Wycked Party
Halloween is an innocent holiday. It’s all tiny children dressed up in cute outfits heading out to collect money for UNICEF and bob for apples, for Pete’s sake. But the Houston Witches Ball — a music- and flame-filled costume party for grown-ups — is a little more intense than your…
Plot Shot
As melodramas go, William Gillette’s adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is serviceable. And the Alley Theatre’s production, headed up by director Gregory Boyd, does well by the quixotic literary figure who some would argue is the most famous in all of Western literature. Tall, thin and brooding, with…
Rat Pack Redux
WED 10/29 To create a comedy gang, all you need is one funny guy, one straight man, one drunk and an innocent man-child. Stir in a dollop of outlaw comedy (think Bill Hicks and Sam Kinison) and you’ve cooked up Houston’s Whiskey Brothers.The Brothers were founded by Rob Mungle in…
The Eclectic Company
In the late 1960s, Sister Corita Kent’s Vatican II-inspired messages and supergraphics style started an ecclesiastical craze that led to a plethora of mod church banners using felt shapes. I seem to recall making one in Vacation Bible School. More than 30 years later, L.A. native Martin Kersels riffed on…
NYBBQ
On my way to host the Houston Press Restaurant Radio Show one Friday afternoon, I stopped by Vic’s Backyard Bar-B-Q Barn on Fondren and grabbed some brisket, pork ribs and links to go. We were doing a show about Texas barbecue, and I wanted to have a mixed plate in…
Make Mine Moo
If you went to Houston’s and asked for a black-and-blue steak, you’d surely be met with a blank stare. But Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse and Wine Bar (2405 West Alabama, 713-520-8840) has chefs who know there’s more to steak than rare, medium and well done. Their juicy, succulent steaks may not…
O.J. All Over Again
So when did R. Kelly become the perverted uncle of the R&B “family”? For me, it certainly wasn’t when the tape, um, leaked. I still haven’t seen the tape, even though everyone I know has, including my best friend, my mama and Bob Saget. If you’ve been in an ice…
Electric Shtick
It’s a cloudless March day in Dallas, and with a few hours to kill before sound check, the Electric Six is doing what any red-blooded American band on tour would do in Dallas: They’re eating hot dogs on the grassy knoll. An hour spins on as the band runs around…
Big Steps
There are several things that Moy Rivas can think about in this flickering moment before the music drops. One, he can look down at his light, wiry 15-year-old body. He wants to go air flare this round, but the move has given him trouble before. When he threw it in…
Lillix Fair
Being a girl is tough. Being a girl in the music industry is damn near impossible, so it would seem. Or at the very least, fucking annoying. The young women of Lillix, which was formed six years ago in Cranbook, British Columbia, by sisters Lacey-Lee and Tasha-Ray Evin, now aged…
Cockeyed Campaign Gambits
City Councilman Bert Keller has never quite managed to cut the figure of a typical conservative Houston politician. Early in his District G tenure, he ran his SUV into a parked truck following a drinking spree at a topless bar and fled the scene to sleep it off. He surrendered…
Roll Over, Eric Clapton. And Tell Stevie Ray the News.
It’s official — the blues is in again, if indeed it ever was out. Following the release of its epic DVD How the West Was Won, blues-rock icon Led Zeppelin is hotter than it’s been since the 1980 day that John Bonham swilled enough vodka to poison a platoon of…
Offensive Driving
Robert Lee Coggin, an Austin electrical engineer, may be on the 20th minute of his 15 minutes of fame. But the coverage may have missed one item worth noting in his stirring legal fight to establish that drivers can legally flip the middle finger at fellow motorists. This month, the…
Ludacris
Something good has to be floating around in the Atlanta water. This year has seen ATL acts Bone Crusher, Lil Jon & the Eastside Boyz, T.I., Youngbloodz, Bubba Sparxxx and OutKast flood the hip-hop market with quality albums, helping make 2003 the year of the New South. So, where does…
Lite Sentences
Two old ladies were vacationing at a Catskills resort. “The food here is horrible,” one said. “I know,” said the other, “and such small portions.” Lisa Luna is in no mood for classic food jokes, not with the recent cuts to the meal budget of the Texas Department of Criminal…
The New Constitution/Stroller
Though neither band hails from anywhere near Houston, the labels on which they’ve released their debuts do. They also have another thing in common: Each quartet wears its influences on its sleeve like a NASCAR driver throwin’ props to his corporate sponsors; each takes a “classic” rock sound and updates…
Letters
The Down Button Elevator alarm: I just wanted to tell you that was the most intense article ever written about elevator accidents [“Catching Elevators,” by Wendy Grossman, October 9]. I couldn’t stop thinking about it all day. I am a district sales manager for a beverage company and am on…
Junior Senior
Danes Jesper Mortensen (“Junior”) and Jeppe Laursen (“Senior”) came together in 1998 to challenge traditional pop conventions, to fuse a variety of influences and come up with an innovative pop music alloy. Finally, their goal has come to fruition, and their new album, D-D-Don’t Don’t Stop The Beat, is arguably…
Weekend in Bug Tussle
There are many mysteries associated with life in Texas: Why does it always rain the week of the trail ride? Why did the Oilers stop sucking only after they left town? And how did the town of Bug Tussle get its name? Author and “student of history” Don Blevins can…
Sean Reefer and the Resin Valley Boys, with Zombilly
If you think Country Legends 97.1 is a misnomer because they don’t play any Webb Pierce or Lefty Frizzell, this show and this band are for you. A local honky-tonk supergroup of sorts, the band is led by Sean Raiford, who sings here (and sounds a lot like Hank Senior)…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, October 23 Cue the fanfare: It’s opening day at the horse races. When you head down to the racetrack, you can pretend that you love the sleek beauty of the animals, or that you find the gentility and tradition of the sport fascinating, but we know what you’re really…
Chip Taylor and Carrie Rodriguez
Talk about a duo that quickly found the sweet spot. Chip Taylor and Carrie Rodriguez struck small-label gold last year with their savvy debut, Let’s Leave This Town. It featured an instantly endearing ditty called “Sweet Tequila Blues” that carved a niche for itself in the neo-Texas phenomenon and gained…
Cleaning Rags to Riches
David Sedaris talks pretty, reading selections from his upcoming book at 8 p.m. Friday, October 24. Jones Hall, 615 Louisiana Street. For tickets and information, call 713-227-4772 or visit www.spahouston. org. $15 to $35.
Pleasure Club
Houstonian by birth, New Orleanian by choice, skull-faced and sharp-dressed James Hall is the founder of Pleasure Club, purveyors of what a bunch of critics are calling Southern goth-rock. And that’s really not a bad description — to listen to this band’s songs is to turn day into night, regardless…
The Horror
WED 10/29 In the land of Nerdville, cultural theorists are kings. While other bookish types busy themselves with arcane subjects, cultural theorists get paid to wax philosophical on popular topics like bad TV and B movies. In the grand spirit of pop-culture pontification, the folks at the Angelika Film Center…
Turn Down the Radio
What a new feel-good sports movie called Radio contrives to move us is just fine — that’s what feel-good sports movies are supposed to do. That its makers chose to move us in the style of a linebacker sacking a quarterback is not so good. After enduring this flagrant emotional…
With Her Gloves Off
WED 10/29 Hear the words “boxing trainer,” and you’re likely to think of Burgess Meredith’s Mickey in Rocky (“You’re gonna eat lightnin’ and you’re gonna crap thunder!”) or of the late, real-life trainer Cus D’Amato, the only man tough enough to keep Mike Tyson in check. Your first thought probably…
Rage Against the Past
Dave, a man who’s barely there, lulls his son to sleep with stories of a boy lost in the woods who escapes from wolves; it’s a thrilling bedtime story for the child, a tale that never loses its excitement. Dave, played by Tim Robbins, relishes the telling of the tale,…
They’re Creepy and They’re Kooky
SAT 10/25 Through the years, we’ve met a number of spooky families: the Munsters, the Addamses and — perhaps the most horrific — the Osbournes. Houston-area kids will get to drop in on another chilling clan in Ace Theatre’s production of The Creepy Creeps. The oddball family, which lives in…
Old School
The Brylcreemed, doo-wopping teens of Rydell High, the mythical setting of Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s Grease, aren’t looking so youthful anymore. At least not as they appear in the traveling production of the show brought to us by Theatre Under the Stars. Of course, if we’re going to talk…