Funny Money
Where the Money Is is the latest attempt at a geezer vehicle — in this case, for Paul Newman. Despite his unassailable movie star credentials and his still handsome mug, Newman is faced with the inevitable dilemma of the graying leading man: either make a film that appeals only to…
Tsk, Tsk, Tasca
At the peak of his career, Samuel Goldwyn, the first of the great Hollywood movie moguls, employed a publicist whose job it was to coin memorable phrases in fractured English. Phrases meeting with Goldwyn’s approval would then be planted by the publicist in various gossip columns, as having been uttered…
Drug Rehab: The Comedy
Rehab, sweet rehab: It’s the last resort of the alcoholic, the drug addict and the would-be suicide. Free room and board, lots of tender loving care and a whole herd of fellow recovering screwups who’ll always be there for you and are willing to admit their imperfections at the drop…
Hot Plate
Lagniappe: In Louisiana, the word means a little bit extra or something free. It’s a mostly foreign concept on Texas soil, so imagine my surprise when I ordered the Bourbon St. bread pudding at Denis Seafood House [12109 Westheimer, (281)497-1110] and received not only the best bread pudding west of…
Boy Meets Goy
Like some pilot for a new ABC series titled Two Guys, a Girl and a Synagogue, Keeping the Faith is a banal sitcom masquerading as religious deepthink dolled up as boy-meets-goy love story. The movie — about a rabbi (Ben Stiller), a priest (Edward Norton, also the film’s director) and…
Six Strings Under
Their egos were as big as their talents. One once attacked a cameraman while on stage at a concert. Ritchie Blackmore, who first played with Deep Purple, then Rainbow, claimed the guy was in the way of the fans. Talk about raging testosterone. Another once said tremolo bars were for…
The redemption of Bret Easton Ellis
Even if you have devoured every word about the cinematic adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 novel American Psycho, about a Wall Street yuppie obsessed with using skin-care products and devouring the entrails of prostitutes, you have not read this one particular fact. And it is a fact. No one…
Not Your Father’s Alternative Band
In 1996, only two years after the band formed, Tonic released its debut, Lemon Parade. It took a while for the album to find its audience, or for the creaky A&M marketing machinery to get up to speed, but by the end of 1997 Parade had gone platinum. It was…
Young at Art
With art derived from crocheted afghans, skateboards and glucose levels, the “2000 Annual Core Exhibition” gives the city of Houston a look at what all those out-of-towners have been generating in their glass-block studios at the Glassell School of Art during the past year. The event is the local fine…
Welcome to the M-Machine
Fenix TX’s ship has come in. And it’s called the S.S. MTV. Homeboys just better know where the life preservers are. “All My Fault,” off the band’s 1999 self-titled Universal debut, will appear on the soundtrack to MTV’s first made-for-TV movie, Jailbait! A dark comedy in which an 18-year-old high…
Midwestern Dialect
Last time John Jasperse was in Houston, he exposed himself. In Excessories, the piece that catapulted the dancer and choreographer to avant-garde acclaim, Jasperse and his deadpan dancers stood facing the audience at DiverseWorks and moved their penises and breasts in a little dance of their own. This time through,…
Letters
Sacrifice FliesRichard Connelly’s article “Low and Outside” [March 30] was just that, “low” in its treatment of the Catholic faith and “outside” the realm of decent journalism. In a failed attempt at humor, Mr. Connelly refers to Annunciation Church as not only a place that offers bread and wine at…
Cambodian Queen
Between forefinger and thumb, Yani Keo holds a freshly clipped blade of grass, wafting it softly in the viscous humidity of a greenhouse. Smell, she says, from where she’s crouching, offering the bit of green. The scent is unmistakable: lemongrass, sweet and strong. She rises to survey the rest of…
Into the Gap
Enron Field is, according to a lot of fans, a wonderful place to see a baseball game. It also just might be a dangerous one, if you’ve got some hyperactive kids. Throughout the upper deck are scattered areas reserved for the handicapped. Built to meet federal Americans With Disabilities Act…
Line Of Defense
Catherine Mehaffey Shelton puts down her glass of Beaujolais and walks quickly out of her bedroom, searching through her pitch-dark house for a gun. “Where is that damn gun?” she says, walking back into the room and rifling through two sets of dresser drawers. Her husband, Clint Shelton, could tell…
Prediction / Closing the Circle.
Prediction The world might end in crispness like a smack on the bottom at birth. A division of the skin or fascia at autopsy. The closing of doors, the departure of planes. Endings without confetti. An unpedaled note on a harpsichord. I think the world will end in Houston. Mold,…
Bad Dog
Julie McLemore and her husband, former Houston Post sports editor Ivy McLemore, grew up within a few miles of each other in the Meyerland area, and though they didn’t meet, and then marry, until much later, the couple found they shared a lifelong passion for James Coney Island cheese dogs…
La Revolución Will Not Be Covered
It’s just a picture of a street sign, but the Houston Chronicle is pointing to it like it’s the Mona Lisa. Front of the Metro section, April 3, under the headline “In Tribute of Senor Chavez,” there it was: a picture of what the caption called “a recently mounted street…
Looking the Other Way
In the Houston Health and Human Services Department, if an employee falsifies city documents, it means automatic termination. According to the unwritten but official policy, the department has zero tolerance for the misdeed. That’s why Anja Cotton was fired from her job late in 1998 as a Health Department food…
Big Meal on Campus
I was skeptical when I heard that Eric’s Restaurant had reopened on the University of Houston campus. This hands-on laboratory setting for hotel and restaurant management students closed more than a year ago, I’d heard, because of some frightening glitches in the system. One professor warned me of flaccid french…
Art Car Outs
Artist Dorman David shelled out a total of $15,000 to beautify his novel ’54 GMC pickup over five previous Art Car Parades. After 1999’s zany festivities, he spent the better part of a year and $5,000 readying his truck called “Killer” for the 2000 version of the madcap series of…
Gray
In the afternoon, around four, the interns and researchers snap to attention when Michael Lieberman enters the lab. A boss-is-here current runs through the room; everyone has something to show him, some result he should see, some quandary for him to ponder. What does he think of this microscope slide,…
“Clearing House” Sweepstakes
The voice on the phone had a tantalizing offer last week. The Insider had just published an article with a partial list of participants in the minority share of the Enron Field food services contract. Would he like to see confidential documents proving that politically connected blacks got three times…
International Festival 2000
Soul Hat Texas Music Stage Saturday, April 8 Austin breeds jam bands like Houston breeds smog. Both are easy to detect. Just open your car window sometime during International Festival as you cruise the downtown streets. On this day, it wouldn’t have been the ozone that choked you, but the…
Southern Belles and Whistles
Transforming a comic novel about turn-of-the-century Georgia into an opera seems a bit like hosting a crawfish boil at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Yet veteran composer Carlisle Floyd seeks to do just that with Houston Grand Opera’s world premiere of Cold Sassy Tree, his lyrical adaptation of Olive Ann…
St. Boss
Everybody’s making a fuss over Bruce Springsteen’s silver-screen debut. In the movie High Fidelity, Springsteen plays himself dispensing wisdom to some aimlessly wandering youngster. But hasn’t the Boss been illuminating life’s murky corners for all of us for years through song? The state of New Jersey will testify to that…
Gold Russian
One would think that the people’s revolution of 1917 would have destroyed the Kremlin’s precious collection of icons, jewels and artifacts. After all, these priceless objects are prime examples of the excesses of the elite: gold pieces encrusted with diamonds and emeralds. Yet Irina Polianina, one of the curators of…
Psychological Warfare
It’s quite possible that American Psycho is a brilliant movie. It’s also quite possible that it’s a dreary, obvious chop-’em-up dressed in Alan Flusser suits and Ralph Lauren boxers, drenched in Pour Hommes aftershave, all to disguise it as bracing satire on the greed-is-good ’80s. The option audiences choose to…
Takes the Cake
Sometimes, late at night, I start imagining there are only two kinds of restaurants: the kind that makes you feel as though you should be grateful for even dining there, and the kind that seems delighted that you’ve selected that restaurant from the thousands of options available to you. You…