Capsule Reviews
Cabaret Cabaret takes place in the low-down, dirty bowels of Berlin, just before the big war, when life was a screaming party. But Joe Masteroff, Fred Ebb and John Kander’s unforgettable musical is more than just entertaining. There’s a terrifying darkness to every frenzied note of this powerful show about…
Nicolai Dunger
It’s 2:20 a.m. and you’ve just come home from the bars for the first time with that special someone, or even, as Hank Jr. might have put it, that honky-tonk special you found. What to slap on the ol’ CD player as the wee hours unfold? You could do a…
So, Did You Hear the One About the Funny Muslim?
In a perfectly ordered world, Mirza Baig goes off to medical school, gets a good practice somewhere in the suburbs, settles down with a girl in a nice, arranged marriage and lives placidly ever after. “Within our culture, the South Asian, Indian subcontinent culture, it’s very — you’re very coerced…
James McMurtry and the Heartless Bastards
James McMurtry’s dispatches from the world where the Wal-Marts meet the meth labs have never gone down easy. He’s a hell of a writer, but he sings the way John Ashcroft probably hides the salami, which is to say he grits his teeth and gets it out, and afterward it’s…
Who’s on First?
Mohammed Mustafa Badawi Amer Omar Najjar is trying to make a name for himself. For the sake of a tongue-tied America, “Mo Amer” will have to suffice. It’s what the local comedian, now 22, has gone by since fourth grade — right around the time Saddam’s army crashed into his…
Various Artists
A 15-track hodgepodge of mellow groove and downbeat lounge, The Sweet Spot was presumably concocted to showcase the vocal talent of several breathy local divas. It’s not so much that the ladies succeed — although in most cases, they do — they anchor. They’re the glue that holds together the…
Sexual Dealing
It was a story local TV found hard to resist: a tearful Minnesota couple telling how their 15-year-old daughter had visited Houston only to be drugged and sold into sexual slavery. The only trouble is, the daughter has returned home, and local law enforcement officials are saying they have no…
Cobain in Clubland
In Nirvana’s brief existence, the band passed through Houston three times — once at the Axiom as virtual unknowns, once at the Vatican when they were well on their way, and finally, at the AstroArena after they had conquered the world. For the tenth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, and…
Flight of Angels
The second time H. Jack Schyma proposed to his girlfriend, he drove eight hours through the night from Houston to her home in Mexico’s Valley of the Angels. Most long-distance boyfriends would have stopped bothering with the trip by then, which Jack had made every two weeks for nearly a…
Juicy Juxtaposition
Igor is dousing his gyro wrap with a bright red salsa that tastes like a combination of roasted red peppers and cayenne powder. He has made himself a massive rolled sandwich with the gyro slices and thick Arab-style flatbread, but his plate is still overloaded with a mountain of meat,…
The Rapture and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Calling punk an attitude has become an MTV-generation cliché. It’s used as a postmortem tribute to a musician’s rebelliousness: Johnny Cash, yo, that guy was punk. But there’s more resonance, now, in punk as an attitude than in its descriptiveness of a sound or a scene — if you accept…
Little Wonder
The sisters take the stage like they’ve been doing this all their lives, like peddling jelly-filleds at Dunkin’ Donuts all that time was just a bad dream. “Make ’em sweat, ladies, make ’em sweat!” the DJ commands. Little Luscious Lacy drops to all fours and, the high heels of her…
Stale Bread
Whoever came up with the idea for bread pudding deserves to be immortalized. The creative dish made from stale bread spans many nations and centuries, but no one person lays claim to making the first bread pudding. The Oxford Companion to Food says its origin may lie in the medieval…
Apollo Sunshine, with Apples in Stereo and the High Water Marks
In the short history since 9/11, there hasn’t been a song that so accurately sums up the feelings of that ambush and its aftermath as Apollo Sunshine’s “Happening” does, and there probably won’t be. “Happening” is a mess of screamed sentiment and squealing synths, the music as ragged and ripped…
Letters
Fur-or over Wolves Stop the suffering: The most disturbing aspect of this story [“Cry of the Wolves,” by Michael Serazio, April 1] is Rae Evening Earth Ott’s utter failure to accept any responsibility for the situation, and that she intends to open another “rescue” reservation. I hope that no more…
Sevendust and Ima Robot
You know Sevendust. The white guy with blond braids who looks like the stoned offspring of Perry Farrell and Dee Snider. The black dude with the nest of chest-length dreads. The other three guys providing the chugging backdrop to the snarling and soothing vocals, yet tragically neglected by the band’s…
Stranger on a Train
The madness starts at 8 p.m. on Friday, April 16, and continues Fridays and Saturdays through May 8.
Sonny Landreth
Sonny Landreth is the second-most-famous slide-guitar player born in Canton, Mississippi, after the legendary Elmore James. He’s also the second-best-known resident of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, behind Carolina Panthers quarterback Jake Delhomme. As for firsts in his life, the 52-year-old became the first Caucasian to join zydeco superstar Clifton Chenier’s Red…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, April 15 Damn. It’s tax day. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a big guy rooting for little government or a little guy rooting for big government — today ain’t EZ. When you’re done doling out your share to the Man, take a deep breath and go check out some…
Mary Gauthier
Long before folk became mood music for the NPR crowd, it was the genre of choice for many a hard-edged musician, including south Louisiana native Mary Gauthier, a woman who doesn’t pull punches or mince words. Gauthier’s tough youth and early family life put the funk in dysfunctional, and she…
Do the Indie Thing
WorldFest runs Friday, April 16, through Sunday, April 25, at AMC Meyer Park 16 Cinema, 4730 West Bellfort. For a full schedule, call 713-965-9955 or visit www.worldfest.org. Individual tickets: $6 to $7.50.
Drowning Pool, with Damage Plan, Hatebreed and Unearth
Even though Desensitized, Drowning Pool’s second album, is to be released the day the Dallas nü-metal band plays Houston, and even though it’s supposed to mark phase two of DP’s career, all discussion about the group still begins and ends with David Wayne Williams. Williams was the portly, pugnacious DP…
Thai One On
We love parties. Festivals? Even better. So it’s a little disheartening to hear that there’s not more buzz about this year’s Houston International Festival. Could it be the spotlighted country, Thailand? At the risk of sounding irreverent, what’s not to like about a place that has given us chicken satay,…
On the Flip Side
The six-month intermission is over. Those of you left in the lobby, wondering if Uma Thurman ever did kill Bill, may now return to your seats, unbuckle your belts and resume your gorging. Rest assured that Kill Bill Vol. 2, the second half of Quentin Tarantino’s fifth movie, offers just…
Beer Bond
SAT 4/17 Before the Metrosexual Age, there was the Men’s Movement, when normal guys would leave their sensitive personae on the vibrating La-Z-Boy for a weekend of drum circles, tree-bark soufflés and squatting in the woods. Such extreme means of exercising (or exorcising) one’s testosterone are passé in this era…
Punish This
Here’s a subject with which no one should ever have to grapple: Is this new version of The Punisher, starring Thomas Jane as the comic-book assassin, better than the 1989 adaptation with Dolph Lundgren? They both offer slight variations on a tale first told in a 1974 Spider-Man comic, where…
Call It What You Want
For the past 20 years, the third weekend in April has brought the wildest beach party in the South. Everyone still calls it the Kappa Beach Party, but its official name is the Texas Beach Party. Started by Kappa Alpha Psi, an African-American fraternity, this fiesta has united fraternities and…
Stage Death
A year to the month before they pulled Spalding Gray’s body from the East River, I saw Spalding Gray die. It happened on a stage in Houston. The monologue and the man, ever hard to distinguish, had fused entirely. And vanished. All that was left was tragedy. His show at…
Songs of Sorrow
American Analog Set puts on a wicked rock show rife with paradox. The songs come out of the gate chugging on an easy groove, the low-decibel meander seemingly going nowhere until it builds and yawns into a big raw sound. These arching, brokenhearted songs of woe are the Fort Worth…
These Walls Can Talk
Solo art exhibits can be like monologues — there’s only one voice. Thematic group shows may offer more variety, but they’re often like the dull chitchat you get when everyone agrees with one another. At a show like the “2004 CORE: Artists in Residence Exhibition” at the Glassell School of…
I Want My Old-School Hip-hop
From a pop-culture standpoint, it’s always an interesting sign when quality reissues trump current releases. Thing is, that’s pretty much all the time. Marvin Gaye deluxe editions soar miles above 99.9 percent of contemporary R&B material. Roots-reggae reissue specialists like Blood + Fire and Moll-Selekta have consistently outgunned any label…
Capsule Reviews
“Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective of Drawings” Born in Turkish Armenia in 1904, Vosdanik Adoian would grow up to be Arshile Gorky, one of America’s most important and influential artists, but he would never forget the land of his birth and the village of his difficult childhood. This intimate retrospective at…
Relying on Reliant
“When you say ‘Reliant Park,’ everybody that you talk to thinks it’s gonna be over there — that hot, black asphalt. No wind, no shade. They don’t know about this place.” So says Houston International Festival organizer Jim Austin. The two of us are standing in a field off South…