Keen Life
Anyone who’s been to a Robert Earl Keen show might have heard him tell the story of his 1974 Fourth of July. Exhausted from the heat and the tequila, Keen took a little afternoon nap while at Willie Nelson’s annual picnic. He awoke to pillars of smoke and an announcement…
Static
Murphy’s law… “Pinch the babies, make ’em cry and holler,” barks Trish Murphy on “Concession Stand,” a saucy number on her long-awaited debut CD, Crooked Mile. The tone is uncharacteristically brazen, but soak it up while you can, because it’s the closest the former Houstonian comes to nasty on this…
Rotation
Ben Folds Five Whatever and Ever Amen Sony/550 If there’s a reason Morphine and the Presidents of the United States of America sound so tiresome on their latest efforts, it’s that clever instrumentation has a short shelf life. For the record, it took the Presidents just two CDs, and Morphine…
Jungle Beat
Ask hip-hop fans about the Jungle Brothers, and they’ll likely refer you to the better known groups De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest. For folks old enough to remember rap’s pre-gangsta days, the Jungle Brothers were the other act in the Native Tongues, a loose collection of young…
Bursting the Bubble
As the “Bubble Boy,” David Vetter was famous across the U.S. Newspapers, TV shows and magazines portrayed him as a happy, well-adjusted child who struggled cheerfully against the immune deficiency that condemned him to a life inside a plastic bubble. But according to a person David called his best friend,…
Alone Again
Carson McCullers, the wunderkind Southern novelist who was both adored and shunned in post- World War II literary circles, was a most unlikely playwright. The finely wrought emotion evident in her androgynous young characters was a product of the careful plotting and golden language common to good novels — which…
Pixel Power
By titling his new show at Texas Gallery “Analog Paintings,” Jeff Elrod presents the viewer a bit of a conundrum. After all, paintings are never digital. And thank god for that, because just as the Internet has so far failed to muster up its promised miracles, computers have far from…
A Killer
There are way too many movies about hit men, but that shouldn’t dissuade you from seeing Grosse Pointe Blank. It’s not quite like any other movie — let alone one about a hit man. That may be because it’s a hit man movie crossed with a high-school-reunion comedy, and the…
Catch Her in the Rye
Kevin Smith is an impassioned jokester. The young writer/director double-whammies the audience by filling in his stick figures with thick brush strokes. His first film, Clerks, was a no-budget goof featuring an entire miniature universe of slacker goons, but its main protagonist was a sweetly jerky lovelorn convenience store employee…
Hard, Round and Full of Seamen
TV programmers and film distributors must be hearing the Call of the Deep. How else to explain the near-simultaneous presentation of two small-screen versions of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and a three-and-a-half-hour director’s cut of the 1982 nautical spectacular Das Boot? Could this reflect some mass Oedipal desire to…
The Insider
Can You Spell Alzheimer’s? The soured romance of lawyers Ron Wardell Jr. and Melanie McKenzie had already given state District Judge Mark Davidson plenty of headaches, but Davidson managed to compound them with an ill-advised e-mail last week that has an appeals court judge steaming. After Wardell and McKenzie broke…
No Competition, Please
Astros owner Drayton McLane is a man in a hurry. Just last week, he ceremoniously unveiled architect’s plans for his new downtown stadium, one with plenty of fashionable retro touches, including natural grass and a monster scoreboard to make fans forget the original Astrodome wonder that was dismantled to make…
Letters
Long, Boring, Informative Wow!! The article on Donna Ballard [“Basic Ballard,” by Brian Wallstin, March 13] was too long and boring, but informative. We do need to know. Thanks, Press. Bill Johnson via Internet The Child on the Street After reading the article on Donna Ballard, I am reminded that…
Press Picks
thursday april 10 Makeup artist to the stars Laura Mercier, crafter of mama Madonna’s look du jour, is in town to spread a little Evita-style glamour. Today and tomorrow, the artiste (whose clientele also includes Lisa Marie Presley and Isabella Rossellini) will command a team of cosmeticians offering free makeup…
What’s in a Name?
It’s a shame that many people know Russo’s Cafe Anthony more for a legal struggle over its name than for its food. It’s a shame, because Russo’s place, located just north of the museum district in a row of converted fourplexes, is a splendid neighborhood-style Italian restaurant. Still, it’s understandable…
Ready to Ride
The Fabulous Satellite Lounge can be a decidedly unfabulous forum for any opening act, let alone a local upstart with an embryonic fan base. The Washington Avenue club’s cavernous interior has a way of making a decent-sized crowd look minuscule, which happened to be the case when the Houston band…