Poets Who Know it
It’s National Poetry Month, and, according to the Academy of American Poets, this marketing push will cause us to buy about 30 percent more poetry books in April than we did last month or will next month. Let’s just hope this literary spring shopping spree does more than just return…
Death by Cash Flow
February may be the unkindest month for Houston chef Greg Webb. This February, instead of celebrating the one-year anniversary of his first restaurant, the eponymous Gregory’s, he was desperately wondering how many more days he could keep the doors open. By March, Webb realized his maiden effort was doomed, and…
Sucking (Blood), Austin-style
There are at least 421 people trying to squeeze through one man-sized door on Sixth Street in Austin. The city is hosting its annual South by Southwest Music and Media Conference and Festival again, and industry types are hip-checking each other out of the way for a look at some…
Wylie Coyote
Back in the early ’70s, a whole bunch of college students, cosmic cowboys and Lone Star hippies were indirectly introduced to Ray Wylie Hubbard via his composition “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother.” As covered by Jerry Jeff Walker, the song reigned as the shout-along, beer-drinking anthem of choice at…
Rotation
Houndog Houndog Columbia/Legacy This record is spooky, in a laid-back, mostly engaging sort of way. Interwoven with subdued, distorted and eclectic instrumentation led by David Hidalgo is the uniquely deep and dirty bass voice of bluesman Mike Halby. Hidalgo and Halby have recently emerged from Halby’s L.A. home studio as…
Ensemble Reassembles
Heads have rolled at The Ensemble Theatre. In the fall, the theater’s board fired advertising coordinator Margie Beegle. Shortly thereafter, education and touring coordinator Adrian Porter quit. And in February, the board told Eileen Morris — the theater’s longtime artistic director — that her services “were no longer needed.” Morris…
The Dukes of Earle
As much as Steve Earle has been known for his rocking, electric approach to country music, the idea that he’d make a bluegrass album is not as remote as it might seem. For one thing, Earle has often used acoustic guitar on his albums and has always threaded a hint…
Tour de Farce
Farce is a dying art. Too much inane TV has all but killed it. Thankfully, Dario Fo, the playwright whose irreverent loopy genius earned him a Nobel Prize for literature, is still around to show us how it’s done. Without a doubt, Accidental Death of an Anarchist — his blade-sharp…
Rolling on the River
Two blocks down Sunset Boulevard from where River Phoenix died from a heroin overdose on a sidewalk, the Houston expatriates of River Fenix are preparing for the biggest show of their career. The most influential alternative radio station in America, KROQ FM in Los Angeles, added the band’s “Speechless” song…
Drawing Bard
A couple of years or so ago Jane Austen suddenly rose from classical obscurity to become the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood. Now, it is Shakespeare himself who has become the magic name to drop. There are straight-up productions of his plays in the works — a star-studded version of A…
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band The Mountain E-Squared Records In a music world that values the latest thing, bluegrass has had to battle a reputation from some quarters that it is an archaic music form that belongs to a time and place long since gone. In recent years,…
High-tech High Jinks
Stuffed full of fantasy comics, addicted to action and steeped in digital technology, the frenetic moviemakers Andy and Larry Wachowski have done what they must: create an eye-popping, morph-mad, quasi-mythical sci-fi flick that will thrill computer nerds as it kicks serious ass. The Matrix also presumes to (ahem!) think deeply,…
Domestic Disturbance
It is fitting that the new installation at the Menil Collection has, as its core creators, a family: Lars Lerup, dean of the Rice University School of Architecture (RSA); painter Sohela Farokhi, his wife; and their ten-year-old son and Lego-master, Darius. All contributed to the design of what purports to…
Psychic Phenomena
Bubba Henderson squints his eyes and shuts his mouth as he stares at a picture of two little girls he has never seen before. He takes a deep breath and tries to shrink inside his body. His vision becomes clearer; he feels the lobes of his brain squeezing together. His…
Letters
Count ‘Em Out Boy, did your article on those goobers at KTRK/Channel 13 strike a nerve [News Hostage, by Richard Connelly, March 18]. Although we rarely miss it, my wife and I love to hate their 10 p.m. news. We play a game and see how many times Shara, Dave…
Bad Cash Investments
Like a Fortune 500 company searching for new ways to boost profits, Brittan Communications International saw a world of opportunity at its fingertips. “In 1996 the company was very prosperous, and it looked like we would continue to be very prosperous,” says Jim Edwards. “The board wanted to diversify into…
Night & Day
Thursday April 1 Step aside, Smokey Bear, Shonda Murray is here with a slightly more visceral warning about forest fires: “When you look up and see a big, huge, ten-foot flame coming, and it just consumes a pine tree and makes it explode, to me that’s like it’s showing what…
News Hostage
Oldies But Oldies It’s always nice to come back from vacation and be greeted with two pieces of welcome news. The first piece of good news was that — finally, finally — brave and visionary men had succeeded in their noble quest to … go around the world in a…
Disconnected
They called it the Fire Sale. For weeks, the members of the skeleton crew that survived the mass layoff in November had been trudging to work, sitting at their desks, doing nothing except hoping that maybe a miracle would occur and the company might somehow rise from the dead. Finally,…
Pushed Around
Mark Lynch means business. He gets out of bed at 3:15 every weekday morning, and soon the oven in his small Montrose apartment emits the entrepreneurial aromas of his baking muffins. Then Lynch turns to the assembly-line task of sandwich-making. Despite limitations of a right arm and leg partially paralyzed…
Delhi-cious
On its answering machine, Ashiana brags that it’s the best Indian restaurant in Houston. That’s an audacious claim — this city is blessedly full of good Indian food — but Ashiana doesn’t make it lightly. There are plenty of other signs that this restaurant takes itself seriously: subdued lighting, quiet…
News of the Weird
Lead Stories *The Times of London reported in March that a convicted rapist in his 30s has been recommended for British government-provided Viagra to treat a depression he has been suffering since his release from prison a year ago. Doctors at St. George’s hospital in Tooting in south London say…
The Mad Hatter vs. the Homeowners Association
A 15-foot concrete teddy bear does a handstand in the middle of Richard Patt’s front yard, and Patt doesn’t know why anyone should have a problem with that. The bear, purchased at an auction, has a painted-on blue-and-yellow-striped sweater, large eyes and a wide-open grin. He used to reside in…
Strike Three, They’re Out
Library shelves groan under the weight of poetic tomes extolling the Paradise Lost of Ebbets Field. Our own Astrodome, on the other hand, has spawned … ummmm … well, literally dozens of newspaper articles, many of them positive. There just doesn’t seem to be a great outpouring of affection for…