Lead Astray
Two years ago, Debra Ferris was renting a crumbling apartment, where she said rats gnawed her peeling walls, a rising bayou invaded her living room and the upstairs neighbors fought and smoked crack. Desperate to get out, she contacted Housing Opportunities of Houston to connect her with a loan to…
Doug Sahm
Remember that line about always wearing clean underwear in case you get hit by a car? Well, that old saw also applies to unfinished and unreleased recordings left behind by deceased musical artists. Hence The Genuine Texas Groover, the set that reissues two of Doug Sahm’s more notable albums along…
Charity Cases
The hors d’oeuvre — a history lesson on sushi — came first. Then the crowd of 35 people drained their Asahis and dunked their hands into water bowls. Rickshaw’s master chef Mike Potowski guided them through the basics of bamboo mats and seaweed, and slicing and dicing seafood. Occasionally, he…
Chris Whitley
Chris Whitley’s 1991 debut, Living with the Law, unleashed a torrent of critical praise and inspired a number of new interpretations of the term “bluesman.” While the Houston-born singer-songwriter-guitarist is not likely to convince a purist that he fits the mold, a number of scribes have declared that his work…
Letters
See-Worthy Confronting the issues: Nice piece on ABS [“Ship Wrecked,” by Josh Harkinson, February 12]. Complete, balanced, rounded, but raises an important and unknown issue. Bob Frump New York City, New York Wringing Bell Racial divide: I am not only highly offended but equally disturbed that the Houston Press would…
Denali, with LaGuardia and Groceries
While the Deftones and Poison the Well might represent a more sensitive, emotionally evocative brand of metal than the variety practiced by, say, W.A.S.P., fans of these groups still demand larynx-lacerating screams and chaotic, climactic choruses. Denali, the opening act for the Deftones and Poison the Well tour last fall,…
No Hateration
What’s up, player? You probably think you’re hot shit with all that bling-bling and debonair flair, but how do you think you’d fare against some of the smoothest operators in the nation? If you feel up to the challenge, then you’ve got to hit the scene this weekend and show…
Yngwie Malmsteen
A headline in The Onion some years ago announced that Yngwie Malmsteen had officially changed his middle name to “Fucking.” But fans of the Swedish shredder, all of them in awe of his lightning-fast fingers and rapid arpeggios, surely believe the item should have appeared in Newsweek. It’s been 20…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, March 4 Ask any band geek, jock or bleacher-dweller — nothing froths up team spirit quite like an old-fashioned march. It’s something just about everybody agrees on. Even folks who’d normally walk a mile in the summer to steer clear of Fleetwood Mac can get off on the group’s…
Todd Snider
There are some singer-songwriters who are more comfortable sitting alone in their rooms composing tunes than they are performing on stage. Not Todd Snider. The stage just gives Snider the platform to embellish his shaggy, hair-of-the-dog story-songs with anecdotes, jokes and musical asides. It isn’t that Snider needs to embellish…
Crimes as Big as Texas
Texas and crime have a long and storied history together. But even with sensational and nationally publicized cases involving jealous dentists confronting infidelity with their luxury cars, cross-dressing millionaires solving neighborly spats with beheadings, and cheerleader moms hiring hit men, do we really have a lock on the country’s most…
Metaphor Alert: Bright Red
At first glance, Hidalgo seems to be nothing more than an old-fashioned, flat-footed adventure epic plunked down on a vast stretch of desert and amply furnished with the usual Hollywood conventions: a strong, silent cowboy on horseback, a couple of villains with nasty black mustaches, a killer sandstorm and a…
Le Smoking
Documentaries about fashion may seem tailored for a specific audience — one that can actually afford haute couture, or perhaps an audience attuned to the bitches, er, personalities of the fashion world. But the story of Yves Saint Laurent should be fascinating to anyone who wears clothes. This weekend, the…
Hutch Ado About Nothing
Maybe the most amazing thing about the big-screen version of Starsky & Hutch is how much smaller it feels than its predecessor, the William Blinn-created, Aaron Spelling-produced cop series that ran on ABC from 1975 to ’79. Everything about this cineplex variation feels rinky-dink, like some extended variety-show skit that…
Advantage: MILFs
From childhood, PE teachers encourage us to develop healthy lifestyles, in part by introducing us to “lifetime sports.” What is a lifetime sport? Not football or bungee jumping, because, face it: At some point we’re bound to snap in half. Lifetime sports are what you can play until your great-grandchildren…
Lace It Up
Anne Wilson breathes life into inanimate objects in her video installation, Errant Behaviors. A heap of lace attempts to walk, like Buster Keaton playing a drunk. A pin carries a tangle of cloth. Two more pins bend and caress each other. Wilson and her collaborators have used stop-action animation to…
Do You Like Them with a Mouse?
SAT 3/6 We bet you like green eggs and ham, we bet you really do. We bet you like them on a train, a plane or even in a zoo. We’re sure you like green eggs and ham — so sure are we indeed — we bet you like green…
Raising the Bard
Oh, happy day! The Alley Theatre’s Gregory Boyd has taken on Shakespeare once again. Wildly innovative, wonderfully strange and never stodgy, Boyd’s Shakespeare can always be counted on to shake up our schoolmarmish expectations of the greatest playwright in the English language. And Boyd’s deliciously entertaining production of the comedic…
Nashville Star
WED 3/10 All those women out there jonesing for a bedpost-rattling moment with George Clooney will surely envy Gillian Welch. When producer T-Bone Burnett approached Welch for help with the breakthrough soundtrack for the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, he asked her to co-write a seduction song that…
Divergence in Style
Opening night of the Houston Ballet’s Winter Repertory Program featured choreographer Julia Adam’s world premiere of Ketubah. Set to live klezmer music and performed by Houston Ballet, the work was full of even-keeled, solemn movement, and its ceremonial structure left room for only brief bursts of fun. The company danced…
Bohemian Rhapsody
The late Jonathan Larson’s rock opera Rent won tons of accolades when it opened in the mid-’90s. Even before it landed on Broadway the show was the stuff of legend. Created in a theater in the East Village by a much-beloved writer who died hours before his Pulitzer- and Tony…
Capsule Reviews
“Ayanah Moor: Word!” It seems like anything can be deemed a work of art once it’s been placed on a gallery wall, and Ayanah Moor’s work on view at Lawndale is a classic example of this phenomenon. For the “A to Z Like Me” series, Moor silk-screened definitions of African-American…
Deep in the Bleeding Heart
There are few artists who can really be called innovative. There are even fewer who really impact whatever unexplored corner of rock and roll they stumble into, and there’s almost no one who has held up doing so for more than 20 years. Since its emergence from the New York…
Capsule Reviews
Fallen Angels As a playwright, Noel Coward definitely didn’t live up to his surname. When Fallen Angels first premiered in 1925, reviewers attacked its immoral content, thereby ensuring it would be a success. Nowadays the play might not seem so naughty — after all, the original scandal revolved around a…
Unfair and Unbalanced
In the early days of rap, way back in the 1980s, every touring artist was a bullshit magnet. Pillars of the community — mayors, the cops, the PTA — all voiced Grave Concern whenever a 2 Live Crew or even a Public Enemy would come to town. Often promoters buckled,…
Spit It Up
No one who enters Vincent’s (2701 West Dallas, 713-528-4313) through the bar will fail to notice the brick-fired oven. Here is where you’ll find the house special, pollo arrosto (half-chicken, $14.95; quarter-chicken, $13.95), gently turning on an open spit, spreading the aroma of Italian herbs, lemon and garlic far and…
Rocket Man
The problems start when Demi Marx breaks a nail. She’s pulling a pink fishnet blouse over her bare breasts when the material snags a French tip and the sucker drops to the wood floor with a soft plunk. Marx, an attractive young woman with a slight overbite and brown hair…
Blues Lucifers
To put it mildly, critics have a hard time pithily describing San Antonio rock underground legends Boxcar Satan. In fact, they wind up sounding a lot less like Lester Bangs than they do Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather or even Jimmy Swaggart. “The next rung down that lake of fire Leadbelly…
Land of Azúcar
Japaneiro’s Sushi Bistro & Latin Grill
Party Like It’s 1899
Just how much of a sinful den of debauchery and decadence was Houston during Super Bowl week? Apparently, not much. The after-action reports are in and the stats have been tallied by the Houston Police Vice Squad, and it looks like Super Bowl week was a bust (insert Janet Jackson…
One Hundred Million Reasons to Go See Great White
It was just over one year ago at the Station nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island, that Great White’s errant pyrotechnics display started a fire that claimed 100 lives — including that of Great White guitarist Ty Longley. As part of their “Help Us Help Them” tour, Great White will…
Bloodless Coup
The LifeFlight emergency helicopter swoops down to the accident scene. It’s bad — the unconscious victim has lost a lot of blood. An ambulance crew is already there and checking the victim’s pulse and blood pressure. The chopper’s blades still whirring, the LifeFlight techs hop out and survey the scene…
Air
Air makes great soft-core porn music. At least seven of the ten songs on their new album, Talkie Walkie, could back the drawn-out slow-motion sex scenes to those old dubbed-in-English Emmanuelle skin flicks and, in some of those instances, actually improve the aesthetic. The tunes really are that evocative of…