Robbing Mrs. Robinson
Oh, Anne Bancroft — older, reptilian goddess who could snake around an innocent young man with lip-licking ease — where are you when we need you? In the 1967 film The Graduate, it was Bancroft’s unforgettable Mrs. Robinson that made us so terrified for dewy-eyed Dustin Hoffman. Her slinky moves…
Go, Baby, Go
On a cool spring morning, Sheree Tullos, a University of Houston political science major, came on the main campus carrying a bomb. It didn’t take long for her to be discovered. A mob of outraged students cornered her in Butler Plaza, hurling insults. One guy with baggy skater pants and…
Time Warp
Rock nostalgists, it’s time to replace those tattered tour T-shirts. This week, three classic rock concerts — one a double header — are coming to Space City. The Aerosmith/KISS show at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion promises a bang for your buck. Sure, KISS will be singing the same irrelevant…
Sultan of Swatch?
If Elvis fans can jockey for a lock of the King’s hair on eBay, why shouldn’t baseball buffs be able to barter for a bit of the Bambino? This summer, Donruss, a Texas-based baseball card company, purchased a rare, 78-year-old, game-worn Babe Ruth jersey for $262,000 at an auction. Will…
Cheese, Please
The best queso, like the best margarita, is in the taste bud of the beholder. But it’s hard to beat the Mexican cheese dip at Noche Cocina y Bar (2409 Montrose Boulevard, 713-529-8559). Consistency and texture are big issues for queso eaters. Some places make a mean queso only on…
A Little Jump to the Right
Annise Parker, the Houston councilwoman and city controller candidate, had just returned to her City Hall office from a morning committee meeting when she got an urgent call from another candidate. The word was out that Gabe Vasquez, who recently changed his political calling card from Democrat to Republican, was…
Brown Suga Suga
There’s more than one thing that’s pretty old-school about Baby Bash and his hit single, “Suga Suga.” First, there’s the song itself: a sticky-sweet praline of a summer jam with a caramelized guitar line running through Bash’s singsong raps and former Kumbia King Frankie Jay’s crooned chorus. The tune has…
Bad Blood on the Tracks
As conservative opponents gear up to derail Metro’s transit referendum, there’s also dissatisfaction with the agency from an unlikely quarter: Hispanic rail allies. They are unhappy over the decision by the pro-rail Citizens for Public Transit political action committee to hire a San Antonio-based ramrod for the campaign. The campaign…
Dutch Treat
The Abbey Pub isn’t sold out, but the crowd is far from meager. A couple hundred revelers shuffle closer to the tiny stage of the Chicago nightspot as the New Amsterdams unveil their strident set opener, “The Smoking Gun,” taken from the band’s new third effort, Worse for the Wear…
The Scalping of Sylvia
When Sylvia Villarreal opens the door of her home in north Houston, she seems in the middle of preparing to leave for work. Her lips are painted, her hair is perfectly coiffed, and a few dark smudges on her forehead look like makeup in wait of a correction. But Villarreal…
I’ll Second That Fab Motion
Down in the Houston Warehouse District, where scrawny cats and rock bands ply their trade, some long-lost characters are gathered around tacos and Red Stripe, preparing for rehearsal. They haven’t been this group-dedicated in years. “We got together again in January,” the guitarist says, informatively. “It was?” the singer buzzes…
Beer Brawl
For a guy who hasn’t touched alcohol for the past five years, Rex Bell has had beer on his mind for a while. Specifically, the downtown Galveston bar owner has been thinking about a new brand of beer that he hopes to launch later this month at his eclectic Old…
Houston 1, Luftwaffe 0
Well, folks, it was fun while it lasted, but after about nine months Stuka’s blitzkrieg of Houston nightlife is now officially over. The club that brought us live shows from Navdeep, Riverboat Gamblers, the Dragons, Starlight Mints/Steve Burns, Longwave, A.R.E. Weapons and Edwyn Collins, among others, and some of the…
Letters
Locked Up with the Lord Faith-based rehab: “Doing Time with JC in the TDCJ” was a great article [by Scott Nowell, September 18]. In my opinion, most men and women come out of the Texas prison system committing worse crimes if they don’t have a loving and strong family to…
OutKast
Beatles parallels are a record reviewer’s best friend and worst habit. But it’s just too tempting, when listening to the fascinating sprawl of OutKast’s double-length latest, to consider it urban music’s heir to “the White Album.” The Georgia duo of Big Boi and Andre 3000, who each contribute a solo…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, October 2If you like to imagine yourself wearing thin linen pants, strolling the deck of a magnificent 50-footer anchored off an uncharted Caribbean isle, then come feed the fantasy at today’s Houston In-the-Water Boat Show. Seasoned boating enthusiasts and novices alike can check out more than 200 boats bobbing…
Sleep
Things you could do in less time than that which drags past, ponderously as an elephant on quaaludes, on the title track of metal act Sleep’s new album, Dopesmoker: 1. Orate at a presidential inaugural. George Washington’s address at the beginning of his second term was only six minutes long…
Off the Wall
Public art is for the birds. And for the trees. And for anyone who happens to walk by. While most exhibitions remove art from its creative context and place it within the whitewashed walls of a museum space, public art installations reinsert works into the outer world, blurring the lines…
Evan Dando, with the Love Scene and the New Amsterdams
It’s been seven years since we heard from Evan Dando, who once lent the Lemonheads a perpetually stoned swagger as well as an affinity for ’60s-flecked guitar pop. During that time, he got hitched, fought — and often lost — a battle with the bottle and eventually got around to…
King of the Roads
Erik Slotboom is the new king of the local road geeks. Houston Freeways took two years to write, but freeway systems have been a lifelong obsession of the 36-year-old engineer and software developer. As a child, he was intrigued by the “spaghetti bowl” of roads at the U.S. 59 and…
The Mars Volta, with Saul Williams
As far out as its moniker, the Mars Volta says yes to nearly every prog-rock pretension. Guitars replicate Santana’s fretboard acrobatics one moment, whale calls the next. Congas, marimbas and ominous electronics add color and claustrophobia to the band’s dense, impenetrable sound. Front man Cedric Bixler Zavala’s opaque lyrics are…
No Hacks (or Jacks) Allowed
When demonstrators protested the men-only policy of Augusta National Golf Club during this year’s Masters tournament, one counterprotester held a sign that read “Iron My Shirt!” This unpressed scholar apparently was implying (among other things) that women ought not to play a “man’s game.” Well, everyone knows that women do…
Jaheim and Javier
For the record, Jaheim and Javier are not a Brazilian samba duo. They are two hot, young, studly, well-hung R&B new-jacks on the rise. (Don’t quote us on that “well-hung” thing — we were just going with the flow.) But even given all that and also that they’re both black…
Mazes in the Maize
FRI 10/3Fall is on its way to Texas, and the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye. This seasonal truism may bring thoughts of corn bread stuffing and Jiffy Pop to the average consumer, but for Dewberry Farm co-owners Larry Emerson and Dan Bradshaw, fall’s bounty brings an opportunity…
Kurtis Blow
Well, Kurtis Blow is coming to town, and one can’t help but have this aching suspicion that there will be two types of people at the show: the serious, back-in-the-day fans who honestly want to see an old pro in action, and the young schmucks who view his appearance as…
O Superwoman
If you’re going to honor somebody, you might as well make it somebody good. For the past two years the Aurora Picture Show, Houston’s microcinema in the Heights, has tipped its hat to an artist who’s contributed significantly to the media arts. This year, Aurora director Andrea Grover decided to…
Time and Again
In Out of Time, we’re asked to believe that 48-year-old Denzel Washington and 32-year-old Sanaa Lathan were high-school sweethearts. In fact, the film demands that its audience ignore all manner of implausibilities. Among them is the behavior of Washington’s Matt Whitlock, chief of police in a tiny coastal town just…
Hot for Teacher
Think of director Richard Linklater’s School of Rock as an informal sequel to Stephen Frears’s adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. The film imagines, sort of, what might have become of voluble rock snob Barry (played by the whirlwind Jack Black) the morning after his grand finale in High Fidelity…
Puffy Shirts, Turkey Legs and Thee
Calling all lords, ladies, dragons, trolls, wenches and harlots. The time has come to descend upon the fantasy village between Magnolia and Plantersville known as the Texas Renaissance Festival. At the event, which is now in its 29th year, you can see jousting and sword fights, hear a ballad of…
Spanish Flies
Though 70 percent of the dialogue in ¡Cantinflas! is spoken in high-flying, fast-talking, double-entendre-filled Spanish, you don’t have to be bilingual to enjoy the play’s high jinks, which will run for one more hysterical weekend at the Alley Theatre. Along with its Marx Brothers-style puns and Spanish jokes, ¡Cantinflas! features…
Frankincense and Popcorn
Our hostess spoons frankincense resin over a red-hot charcoal briquette in the ceremonial burner on our table, and a cloud of fragrant smoke blooms into the air. It smells like church. She also sets a large basket of popcorn before us, then pours thick, dark-roasted Ethiopian coffee out of a…