Faking It
An exhibit saddled with a name that contains not only a play on words, but a sub-subhead, might well be cause for alarm. And indeed, “Justapose: Strategy and Style: Explorations in Fictional Narratives” does take itself a bit too seriously, despite its investigation of the playful activities of dressing up…
Rotation
Sting Mercury Falling A&M For years, Sting has struggled to keep his effective pop song writing from being drowned out by his lofty musical and lyrical ambitions. As recently as 1993’s Ten Summoner’s Tales, he succeeded, showing that his penchant for unorthodox meters and counter-intuitive key changes can lift his…
Slavic Surprise
Makarov is not a straightforward, linear movie. Instead, this is an odd, dark and comic film about the problems of being a poet and a gun owner. Shadow play (full figure and hand puppet), poetry recitation and constant, inexplicable requests for cigarettes are a major part of the narrative. Much…
Static
Out of the Cradle… When you get right down to it, the concept of the Cradle Concert holds more groundbreaking appeal than its lineup. Headliners Jesse Dayton, Robert Earl Keen, Marcia Ball, Flaco Jimenez and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown are all well-known staples on the Texas touring circuit; music-conscious Houstonians can…
Personal Journey
With The Journey of August King, John Duigan (The Year My Voice Broke, Sirens) has done a masterful job of bringing the audience to another time, and another place. The time is 1815, the place is deep in the North Carolina mountains and the story Duigan tells is of a…
Hillbilly Revenge
Remember geek rock? Back in the late ’70s, it took the guise of the new wave singer/songwriter when self-proclaimed English losers such as Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson made low self-esteem cool and gave homely guys some long overdue respect. Both artists, of course, spawned scads of less capable (the…
World of Film
Once again, the WorldFest/Houston International Film Festival is offering more of the same, only less. Continuing its evolution into the “lean, mean festival machine” promised two years ago by director J. Hunter Todd, the 1996 edition of the annual extravaganza will showcase approximately 44 features. That’s more than 100 fewer…
Price Guide
If you want to catch all that WorldFest has to offer, you have a couple of options. You can buy individual tickets ($20 for the opening night gala, $5 for matinees, $7.50 for evenings; available approximately an hour before each screening), or you can spring for one of the package…
A Few Concessions
A film festival is not all art and culture. Like any other celebration of fandom, a film festival is also about indulgence. Aficionados take time off to wallow with their hobby, and for plain sloth. General Cinema Meyerland Plaza, the site for this year’s WorldFest, is a theater well-equipped for…
Signals
Despite their high profile on A-list festivals in Europe and Canada, South Korean films are conspicuous by their absence from the diet of U.S. moviegoers. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to recall the last time a South Korean-produced feature received any sort of commercial distribution in this country. For that…
Archer’s Way
Houston Congressman Bill Archer has a vision. It’s of an America in which April is just another month, and April 15 just another day. A land where “form 1040” has no meaning, a country where “Schedule A” is the first page in a vacation itinerary, a nation where “personal deduction”…
The Insider
HISD-Partnership Bonding If some in the hierarchy of the Greater Houston Partnership had their way, HISD would be forced to obtain voters’ approval for future tax increases, and any increases would have to be tied to student attendance levels. That was the modest proposal made by Partnership president Jim Kollaer…
Stadia Watch
We’re bemused by the way the projected cost of building a new downtown basketball arena for Rockets owner Les Alexander has doubled — at least in the pages of the Chronicle, and with no explanation of why. Although it’s getting hard to keep up with these things, given how every…
The Post is Dead (Again)
The Chronicle’s years-long campaign to kill off the Post was code-named “Operation Falcon” by the winners, who immortalized their April 1995 conquest in an epic wildlife painting now displayed at the paper’s downtown headquarters. Almost a year later comes the successful conclusion of what might be dubbed “Operation Cockroach,” with…
Murky Water
When the federal government proposed last summer to create a wildlife refuge for migratory songbirds in the river bottoms southwest of Houston, the political and business leaders of Brazoria County howled in unison. A refuge, they insisted, would destroy property values and bring development to a halt. Leading the protest…
Letters
Grave Concerns I implore you to print this response to T.M. Rockwell [“The Ultimate in Sexism,” Letters, March 28], whose comments on “Sex and Death on the Restroom Wall” [By Brad Tyer, March 7] could have been more appropriately titled “The Ultimate in Naivete.” I won’t dispute the pornographic nature…
Fourth and Long
The offensive line was composed chiefly of cooks. On Saturday, they had allowed the quarterback to suffer so greatly that on Monday, he came to practice in street clothes. Dwight McDonald said he couldn’t bear to be hit again so soon, but the coach was not understanding. “If you can’t…
Press Picks
thursday april 11 Tour de Bayou Tonight is the first of six Thursday evenings of “free races, free water, free fun.” The races referred to are of the foot variety, specifically going cross-country, even more specifically going cross-country near areas such as Buffalo Bayou. So the series involves more of…
Taking Chances
Sitting through Bruno Barreto’s Carried Away is a bit like watching someone defuse a bomb. A great deal of your appreciation for what you’re seeing is informed by the certainty that, at any moment, the whole thing could have blown up in somebody’s face. Consider the plot: Joseph (Dennis Hopper),…
Sainted Supping
My second visit to the counter at Sunnyside’s Heaven-N-A-Blanket involved some uncertainty, which expert assistance quickly resolved. Upon hearing that I had already sampled the meat loaf with tomato gravy and couldn’t decide what to have next, Carol Swanson cocked her head and quickly checked my soul-food credentials. “You eat…
A Different Desire
When a venerable professor I studied playwrighting under in college described what it was like to be at New York’s Barrymore Theatre on the night of December 3, 1947, he would talk as much about what happened in the audience as he would about what happened on the stage: A…
Highway 10 Revisited
“Al Stewart Singing Syd Barrett’s Bob Dylan’s Blues.” This beast of a song came to Mikael Martin in a waking dream, its cluttered title a radio DJ’s nightmare — eight words strung together in a sequence inadvertently designed to tie your tongue in knots. Still, if you wanted to sum…