Midtown Getdown
Well, the Music Awards season is finally at an end, so that means you can expect two things from Racket: One, faster response time on e-mails and phone messages, and two, a column with a bunch of stuff I didn’t have time to chase down during the busiest time of…
Scissor Sisters
Two years ago, the campy New York-based quintet Scissor Sisters took Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” to the dance floor, shoved the prog rock chestnut in a box and sent it express-bound for Bee Gees country. Though fans lumped them into the electroclash scene, they wisely avoided becoming too associated with…
Ashlee Simpson
The first line on Ashlee Simpson’s debut album Autobiography is, “You think you know me.” That’s pretty funny, considering the entire point of her new MTV show and the gum, pizza and shoe ads is for us to get to know America’s premiere sibling suck-up. When big sis Jessica’s latest…
Playbill
Usher, with Kanye West Here’s what I don’t get about this ongoing national obsession with Usher: Everybody’s giving him props for revealing all this personal stuff on Confessions, an assemblage of sensitive lyrical riffs about how much of a coochie-feenin’ freakazoid he’s been in the past. But, if you had…
Moses Guest
Moses Guest’s last album — a 2002 self-titled double CD — was one of the best local music releases in recent years. But the danger for a band in hitting so high a mark is that your next effort is hyper-scrutinized and usually suffers by comparison. That’s the inevitable case…
HCCS’s Gift Basket Bonanza*
At a packed public meeting early this year, Abel Davila’s relatives walked down an aisle and squashed into a momentary traffic jam. Holding his baby son, Davila told them to turn sideways so all 12 could squeeze in near a microphone in front. They assembled around his father, Arturo Davila,…
A Royal Shame
Garry Marshall’s at it again. The director of Pretty Woman, Beaches and the original Princess Diaries has returned to peddle his particular brand of überschmaltz in The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, in which he disguises an insidious worship of wealth and privilege as a “feel-good” comedy about a wacky…
Letters
Your Friendly Serial Murderer Slay bells ring: I was absolutely shocked when I read your article with my coffee this morning [“The Killer Next Door,” by Sarah Fenske, July 29]. I knew Tony Shore. He installed my phone line in my home in Montrose ten years ago. My blood ran…
Yes, You Can
A good friend likes to say that there’s only one kind of great pop song — the song that someone had to create, as if the writer and performer had no choice. The song can be corny or cynical, upbeat or downhearted — it doesn’t matter. All that counts is…
On the House
To the naked eye, San Francisco and Houston don’t have very much in common. One smells of salty Pacific air; the other, barbecue. One has been immortalized romantically in countless film shots. The other has been mocked widely by Super Bowl reporter-snots. Yet lack what we may when it comes…
Extreme Makeover
Hoot and holler all you want. Director Sidney Berger’s Western take on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew is more fun than a hoedown on a Saturday night. Purists might be fuming, but this old-dog of a comedy has been tricked up with fine, newfangled charms. In Berger’s version, most…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, August 12 In Beatriz Rivera’s latest novel, Playing with Light, two groups of Cuban women — one in bustling present-day Miami, and the other in 19th-century Cuba — read about each other. Rivera herself will read from the resulting tale of adultery, sexism, classism and, of course, family today…
Double Trouble
It’s just past the midpoint of another Houston summer, and in the art world, that means it’s time for someone to ride into town, survey the local talent and stir up trouble. The Big Show, Lawndale Art Center’s annual juried exhibition, is the show everybody loves to hate. But this…
No Kids in the Hall
Pity poor Aisha Tyler. No, not because she was forced to play love scenes with David Schwimmer on Friends, nor because she had to endure my-wife-has-a-meat-fetish clips from Jerry Springer as the host of cable’s Talk Soup. Rather — as Redd Foxx, Tim Allen and Bob Saget have found out…
Capsule Reviews
All Female Cast Western Musical First, the good news: Slump’s All Female Cast Western Musical lasts one hour. Then, the bad news: It lasts one hour. In the guise of free-for-all theater of the absurd, this amateur hour created by Keith Reynolds is perhaps the ultimate theater reality show. In…
Writing in Circles
SAT 8/14 Before the ’60s, most Texas literature was exactly what a non-Texan would’ve expected it to be: full of cattle drives, campfires and tumbleweeds. But then along came the writers of Mad Dog Inc. “In some ways, they’re the Texas version of the Beats, in terms of the relationships…
Capsule Reviews
“Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America” If you go to this exhibition expecting to see works by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, you’ll be disappointed. By emphasizing important but perhaps less familiar artists — indeed, many of the works on display have rarely, if ever, been shown in the…
Tuna Season
SAT 8/14 Truthfully, Houstonians never have had much love for our neighbors up north on I-45. (Just what the hell is a metroplex, anyway?) So in September ’02, when pasty, droopy-eyed Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones smirked in an interview at the idea of the first-year Houston Texans beating his…
Moovin’ On Up
Dairy Queens are so ubiquitous in the Lone Star State that the familiar red logo is sometimes referred to as a Texas stop sign. So naturally we were interested when the company sent out a release saying customers would get a free sample of their new frozen drink if they…
A Base for Drums
SAT 8/14 It’s so hot, even rappers Jay-Z and Nas are on its tip. We’re not talking about the latest Escalade — we’re talking about bhangra, one of the spiciest musical genres on the globe. In the U.K., it’s so established that many musicos there dub it “the British hip-hop.”…
Marinara Monopoly
We’re seated near a wall of glass that looks out onto a dense stand of pine trees. The rain has left a fog on the windows, so the greenery is soft and out of focus. The high-ceilinged dining room at Amerigo’s Grille in the Grogan’s Park complex in The Woodlands…
Rub-a-Dub-Dub
THU 8/12 Musical purity ain’t what it used to be. In today’s genre marketplace, combo platters like rap-metal, pop-funk and electro-salsa have become more the rule than the exception. Enter Grimy Styles, a five-piece band from Austin who’ll be playing at Super Happy Fun Land this week. These guys use…
Long Gone
Even though Chef Michael has moved on, his legacy lives on at La Strada (322 Westheimer, 713-523-1014) in “Michael’s favorite chicken” ($12.95). Thin slices of chicken scallopini, which have been coated with spicy bread crumbs and then sautéed in a lemon-butter sauce, are piled high on a bed of smooth…
Boys Do Cry
When Robert Smith commissioned his nieces and nephews to scribble the artwork for the Cure’s new self-titled album, he had three simple requests: Draw a good dream, draw a bad dream, and make sure to include the words “The Cure.” The results resemble the scrawled refrigerator art parents lovingly stick…
Hitting the Bricks
Flanked by shaggy lawns and empty malt liquor cans, Catherine Roberts stands in the center of the last surviving brick street in Freedmen’s Town, closes her eyes and raises her arms to the sky in prayer. In much the same way, she says, early residents of Houston’s first African-American neighborhood…
Songs Of Freedom
Clearly a lot of time and effort goes into selecting the music for Democratic and Republican campaign events. The two camps must have teams of people sitting around long boardroom tables, eating Chinese food and wearing out boom boxes ’til the wee hours, because nothing is left to chance with…
