Tenacious D
I’m a freak — a freak for short, kinda squatty, balding, basic loser-type guys who have no clue they’re losers. Their idea of working out is one pushup (without using their arms or their legs). Oh, and they gotta play heavy metal, fraught with nasty lyrics, on acoustic guitar only…
Les Pass
Finally — after 15 or so years of planning and scheming and begging money and plotting political machinations, after enduring endless seasons of cramped spaces, crumbling infrastructure and shabby, faded surroundings that screamed Podunk to the rest of the show-business world, after three years with no home at all –…
Boney James
Boney James’s Ride is looser, funkier and far more likely to be heard inside a balla’s Escalade than any of his previous efforts. It helps that James has peppered the album with contemporary R&B singers such as Dave Hollister, Jaheim and Trina Broussard. Then again, the album does include a…
Beach Party Blues
Tourism drives the Galveston economy, and so it would seem residents would welcome a yearly event that attracts about 150,000 visitors in April. But now city officials are looking to the east — East Beach, that is — to try to corral the raging, unwanted beast that has become Beach…
The Lord’s Work?
It is possible to admire Frailty, directed by Texas-born actor Bill Paxton, without actually liking it. It’s not, strictly speaking, a gratifying movie: Too dependent upon twists, both excruciatingly obvious and irritatingly ludicrous, it never fully satisfies; what you can’t guess you won’t see coming, because it’s too outrageous to…
Hot Springtime for Sheridan
Late last month, more than 100 University of Houston professors gathered at Farish Hall Kiva for what could have doubled as an acerbic question session in the British House of Commons. Just as when opposing party members in Parliament raucously taunt the prime minister, this UH main campus hall echoed…
Barry Bad
On September 10, Barry Sonnenfeld’s Big Trouble, a slight comic caper drenched in the sweltering muck of Miami, was a nagging chore to be tended to by film critics — one more mediocre multimillion-dollar all-star fiasco in which you can almost hear the filmmakers giggling behind the cameras. On September…
Camera Ready
News-junkie Houstonians who are starved for entertainment now have a great new option: the 10 p.m. news on KHOU. Channel 11 has long been the most sober of this city’s TV news offerings, occasionally even eschewing a run-of-the-mill police chase for a City Hall story. But KHOU’s late broadcast now…
Law of Averages
On Christmas Day, 1978, Santa left a clunky machine under the tree for my dad. It looked like the bastard child of a typewriter and a portable TV with a cassette player as its conjoined twin. The thing was a Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor), a primordial PC that stored…
The Fate of Yates
The Fate of Yates Macho Rusty: Russell Yates should have been charged as a co-conspirator in the deaths of his children [“Otherworldly,” by Margaret Downing, February 28]. Why? He was warned that his wife should not have any more children after the fourth. But Mr. Macho didn’t think much of…
When Online Got Off Base
On a good day, Mark Cuban might respond to a journalist’s query with a terse, unpunctuated e-mail that reads like something dashed off by a hostage while his captors are in the can. It’s understandable: The man’s running the Dallas Mavericks, investing in movie distribution and exhibition companies, sticking it…
Inside Outside
According to director Stephen Rayne, Alan Ayckbourn is the most popular playwright in his native England. “Huge. More popular than Shakespeare,” Rayne says. And he’s not the most-produced playwright in the UK simply because his small-cast plays are affordable for regional theater. “He absolutely has his finger on the pulse…
Greek Mixology
Still stumbling after the blast of the Exploding Irish Car Bomb around the corner at The Stag’s Head (see “Stirred and Shaken,” April 4), I wandered into Mykonos Island Restaurant (2181 Richmond, 713-523-4114). The place was growing quiet, with most of its customers seated at the bar. After plopping down…
Death to Patch Adams
In the past decade, the manic, profane but good-natured fearlessness that Robin Williams achieved as a comedian has dwindled to just an on-screen glimmer. He spent most of the ’90s playing saintly psychologists (Good Will Hunting), saintly doctors (Awakenings and the universally loathed Patch Adams), saintly vagabonds (The Fisher King),…
Keep On Shuckin’
They put a couple of ice cubes on top of each raw oyster at Gilhooley’s to keep it cold. I push the ice aside and squeeze a few drops of lemon juice onto my next victim. The naked shellfish wiggles helplessly on the little fork as I lower it wickedly…
Fox Bids Adieu
“I’ll never be able to work that hard again, to work on my feet cooking in a restaurant again,” says Tom Williams. These are terrifying words to come from the mouth of a chef, but Williams seems to be handling the news rather well. Right now the master of Low…
The Offering
The mixed grill (regular, $46.95, or deluxe, $64.95, both for two people) at El Tiempo Cantina (3130 Richmond, 713-807-1600) is made for those who can’t make up their minds. It includes nearly everything that the restaurant makes: chicken and beef fajitas, a slab of baby back ribs, two different kinds…
Houston, Icarus Has Landed (in Montrose)
Just before and even a little after the release of Spiritualized’s Let It Come Down, word out of London had it that this was to be Jason “Spaceman” Pierce’s “rehab album.” And song titles like “The Twelve Steps” and “The Straight and the Narrow” seemed to bear this theory out…
Motivational Motörhead
Motörhead front man Lemmy Kilmister certainly has a way with words. The sore-throated singer and bass guitar bruiser once described his band’s music as an amphetamine-driven fist of fury. Another of his pithy pronouncements had it that if he moved in next door, your lawn would die. End of story…
Back To Basics
Little Steven Van Zandt speaks of rock and roll as though he were mourning a friend who died a long time ago. “I just miss it, man, you know?” he says. “I don’t know what happened. What we used to call traditional rock and roll just kinda went away. Other…
West End Glitz Blitz
There have been some unusual nighttime sightings on Washington Avenue recently. Residents and regulars are beginning to notice a new breed walking the street, which has for decades been home to many of the city’s roots music venues. The Johnny-and-Jane-come-latelies are in their mid-twenties to early thirties. They wear designer…
Lambchop
In the ’70s, “countrypolitan” artists such as Charlie Rich fused traditional country with strings and R&B in an attempt to woo upwardly mobile Southerners. The modern-day ensemble Lambchop shoots for a poorer, hipper audience, dusting off soul chestnuts, twanging up indie rock fare and singing about bad LSD trips. On…
Robert Earl Smith
These days, the genuinely exceptional, low-key Texas country-folk album is a rare animal indeed, despite all the young Texas mongrels and old road dogs trying their hands at the art. And it is an art, one that Jerry Jeff Walker all but perfected back when he could still sing and…
Hidden Speaker
Houston-bred Evan Dickson, founder of Hidden Speaker, is back in town, at least some of the time. His schedule finds him shuttling back and forth between Houston, Austin (where his band is rehearsing) and Los Angeles, where Dickson hopes to put the screenwriting skills he learned at UT to good…