A Sense of Placement
From the moment he steps out onto the steep driveway near the small house in Austin, Zeng Geng Zeng knows something is very wrong. “The road is higher than the front door. That’s bad,” Zeng informs his host. “And your driveway — too straight. Also, the front door is in…
Rotation
Neil Diamond Tennessee Moon Columbia If chest hair could sing, you can almost bet it would sound like Neil Diamond. Thirty years and 100 million albums after his humble beginnings as a folkie pop singer/songwriter, Diamond finds himself orbiting the earth in a stratosphere of the mega-celebrity, representing our planet…
Time to Sow
On weekends at the community garden on Alabama Street, the fourth dimension plays tricks — time stretches and bends, and people who stop by for a few minutes are still hanging out under the oaks hours later, sipping beer and solving the world’s problems. Those other appointments that had seemed…
The Insider
Oopsie! House majority whip Tom DeLay failed miserably in his quest to rid Fort Bend County politics of his ex-partner’s wife, proving once again that sometimes his big head can just get in the way. Ever since Jacqueline Blankenship’s husband Robert settled his lawsuit against DeLay and others over the…
Being There
Suddenly, he’s on the front page of the New York Times and being feted at fundraisers in River Oaks and the plusher precincts of Dallas. But his remarkable rise from pickup-driving schoolteacher-cum-fringe candidate to Democratic U.S. Senate nominee raises the obvious question: will success spoil Victor Morales? Morales, naturally, says…
Stadia Watch
While Metro considers raising the basic bus fare for the second time in two years, the transit agency’s one-cent sales tax is being eyed as a possible source of funding for stadium construction/renovation. Peter Coneway, the Goldman, Sachs managing partner who heads the Sports Facility Public Advisory Committee created by…
Letters
More Cheese After having read Brad Tyer’s “Philadelphia Story” [Cafe, April 4], in which the author describes his search for a Philly cheese steak, I am left with a sense of remorse for the citizens of Houston, who have been cheated out of a realistic rendering of the state of…
Press Picks
thursday april 18 Art Car Weekend “Na na na na na na na na, na na na na na na na na, Art Car!”; “I got an Art Car on my mind”; “Ooo-wee, hums like a bee, Houston Art Car can’t be beat” — all weekend long, Houstonians will be…
Fat Monday
In one of the choicest meal deals in town, the new Crescent City Cafe offers two fried shrimp platters for $10.95 on Monday nights. And what fried shrimp they are! Ethereally battered, with a layer of hot air between the breading and the shrimp (how do they do that?), butterflied…
Mix and Match
Opening the menu at the Tuscany Grill, I was bemused. This looked like no Italian menu I’d ever encountered. Yes, there appeared an occasional nod to things Tuscan, such as the mention of rosemary, a favorite Tuscan seasoning. And the Italian standards of fontina cheese and prosciutto showed up a…
Static
Reluctant outlaws… There’s an unlikely foursome out there doing their best to rub out the thickening, sickening line between shallow Nashville hit-making and stiff roots-country purism, and the funny thing is, it hardly seems like they’re trying. Of course, definitions of “trying” can vary from band to band. See, the…
Everything Festival
Talk about a multi-cult glut: for its 25th year, the Houston International Festival is hosting more than 100 acts on six stages in an area that covers 20 city blocks. Pondering the sheer volume of music booked for this “world’s fair style” event is exhausting enough, let alone deciding which…
Having Some Nasty Fun
Too Much Joy has never been a standard one-insult band. In fact, their resourcefulness in devising ways to piss people off has kept them afloat for the better part of a decade. The New York quartet announced its existence in the late ’80s by laying into a pair of American…
Broken Vows
In promoting its new production of Vincenzo Bellini’s bel canto masterpiece Norma, Houston Grand Opera has implied that soprano Carol Vaness is the Norma for this age. Such an implication raises expectations to an extremely high level, to say the least. Moreover, it puts a great deal of pressure on…
Respected to Death
There isn’t anything glaringly wrong with Franco Zeffirelli’s film version of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Indeed, quite a few things are right on the money. Charlotte Gainsbourg’s soulfully austere performance in the title role is affecting and fearlessly unglamorous. (Several characters, including Jane herself, describe the heroine as “plain,” and…
A Real Girl
On a drearily overcast Sunday afternoon six years ago, I visited Auschwitz. For reasons I didn’t entirely understand at first, I felt compelled to touch everything within my reach. I grasped the barbed wire until my palms were in danger of bleeding. I held the sleeve of a prisoner’s uniform…
The Fire Next Time?
Last September 11, a pair of computers in Exxon’s Baytown refinery stopped talking to each other for 15 seconds. That brief lapse in communication caused more than 66,000 gallons of naphtha, a highly volatile petroleum distillate, to spew from several damaged pipe connections and form a giant vapor cloud. A…
Days of Living Dangerously
Exxon is fond of declaring its commitment to safety, even when such declarations fly in the face of the facts. After a November 20, 1994 Houston Chronicle article described several safety problems at the Baytown refinery, Exxon Corporation senior vice president Harry Longwell wrote the presidents of the four plant…