Letters
Leashing Out Mr. K’s kind: It makes me very sad that your awful article about Mr. K’s seemed to be an attack on the women who are literally giving up a normal life in their efforts to save lives [“A Dog’s Life,” by Margaret Downing, April 8]. You make a…
The Sounds
Swedish firecrackers the Sounds may wield synths as deftly as any new wavers, but their punkish metal stems from a very different place. Just chat with three members of the band — guitarist Felix Rodriguez, bassist Johan Bengtsson and keyboardist Jesper Anderberg — as they nurse hangovers and chat by…
Fantastic Fusion
Chunks of ahi tuna are seared on the outside and red and raw in the center. They’re scattered along a skinny, plank-shaped cracker teetering on a nest of crisp mixed greens tossed in a garlic-soy dressing. Hiding below is a nice-sized mound of truffled mashed potatoes. The ahi tuna salad…
Sawyer’s Adventures
You know that stereotype about preachers’ kids? It cuts both ways. Margo Sawyer’s parents raised her in an agnostic household, so naturally, she developed a fascination with all things sacred. Sawyer’s father was a diplomat, and she and her mother were among the few to visit Egypt during the 1973…
Marshall Crenshaw
In the midst of the punk and new wave explosion about 25 years ago, Marshall Crenshaw was the great pop hope. Though he never quite attained household-name status, he now rests comfortably in the chair of the elder statesman — author of a tome on rock movies and occasional actor…
As You Like It
When the waiter delivered the crawfish dinner ($15.95) at the Magnolia Bar & Grill (6000 Richmond, 713-781-6207), he asked with a wry smile, “Do you think that’ll hold you for a while?” The massive dinner platter is a crawfish feast. No peeling, no mess, no sucking the heads — just…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, April 22 Today swinging couples from all over the nation will, um, converge at Live Oak Resort for Hedo-Fest ’04, a four-day festival of nudity, networking and gang-banging. “Hedo-Fest ’04 is a gathering of open-minded couples interested in exploring their sexuality in a secure, private resort,” says Larry Hilderbrand,…
Blonde Redhead
Longtime Blonde Redhead fans may be a bit put off by the less jagged and even more melancholic sounds of the band’s latest album, Misery Is a Butterfly. Then again, the band’s never been one to sit still. Journeying from noise-rock roots to clavinets and duets, Blonde Redhead has found…
An Avril Afternoon at the Mall
It’s Thursday afternoon in the Katy Mills Mall food court, and Avril Lavigne’s fans are screaming and chanting. They’ve turned out, a couple of thousand of them, to see the pop-punk sulkstress on her AOL-sponsored Surprise Mall Tour, which has set up shop in this huge overstimulating shopping mecca in…
Miles to Go
In an era of “smooth” radio formats, jazz needs all the good PR it can get. Purists may point to “straight-ahead” traditional jazz as the bastion of legitimacy, but this style can be off-putting to the rest of us. It can get old watching one guy on stage spit out…
The Methadones, with J. Church
“Say goodbye to your generation,” roars Methadones lead singer Daniel Schafer, a.k.a. Danny Vapid, on the best cut on the band’s record Career Objectives, “The whole damn thing’s going down the tubes.” If so, it won’t be the Methadones’ fault, for they are a rare pop-punk band that rises above…
Total Contempt
The scam was so simple, it hardly counts as a scam: Take the money, and don’t even bother to run. Just stall. The author of the plan was a flimflam man from Beaumont, a former nightclub owner desperate for cash. Back in 1979, 41-year-old Odis Briggs was just “jobbing around,”…
We Want the Funk
Gone are the sagging couches and warped pool tables. The tattooed crew must have moved on to Rudz, ’cause this crowd looks a lot tamer. You can actually breathe in here. Cecil’s Tavern has a decidedly different feel these days, thanks to a lot of Bennigan’s-style renovations. Cecil’s, that venerable…
Etta James
As of 1988, Etta James was known for a bunch of stuff, good and bad: a raunchy stage presence; a huge voice that could express pain like no other and had a rare facility with blues, jazz and rock; and songs like “W.O.M.A.N.,” “Tell Mama” and “Dance with Me Henry.”…
Feeling a Draft
Everybody has that friend who will skip over normal TV sporting events in favor of more radical, esoteric entertainments. Lumberjack contests. Polynesian cliff diving. Water polo. And this weekend, as the rest of the American public fixates on the NHL and NBA playoffs and the first Red Sox-Yankees series, that…
International Noise Conspiracy, with the Offspring and theSTART
Another Swedish band (see above) — this one is swathed in farfisa organ, mod haircuts and Marxist politics. The INC grabbed a bit of buzz at the cusp of the ’60s-ish garage revival back in 2001, but their influences are much more current than the usual Nuggets names. In fact,…
Down Low
SAT 4/24 On OutKast’s latest album, there’s a song where a girl asks the question “What are you afraid of, the love below?” If your answer is yes, then there’s a party this Saturday you should probably avoid. GMC Productions, along with the cats at Reggae Bodega, is hosting “The…
Joss Stone
Legend has it that velvet-voiced teenage British soul sensation Joss Stone was all set to launch a career as a Britney Spears clone when, at the last moment, she heard some vintage Miami soul from Betty Wright, became transfixed, hurried on down to Scarface City and instead launched this career…
Rhythm Method
SAT 4/24 As their eyes lock in an erotic stare-down, Joe Celej’s fingers grip Marlana Walsh’s delicate hands, their bodies mirroring each other as their muscles tense and release in a throbbing rhythm. It’s the sign of a good contemporary dance performance: The human form becomes the central character. Here,…
Family Ties
In Israeli writer-director Nir Bergman’s Broken Wings, we never see an automatic weapon, a military roadblock or a horrific explosion on a city street. Rather than dealing with the volatile politics of the Middle East, this quiet, soul-wrenching film examines the unresolved traumas of one middle-class family trying to cope…
Tot Rock
Say you’re a music lover and you’ve got a kid. You want to get them into music, but you don’t want to subject yourself to the tinny pop and tiny playlist on Radio Disney or the preachy, utterly condescending ministrations of the likes of (shudder) Barney. What to do? Go…
Heart of Gold
Up front, it’s “full disclosure” time. Let it be confessed here, publicly, that I have never been a religious Neil Young fan. Always liked him okay, always appreciated his adventurous spirit, never bought his albums. However, since I’ve also never met a Canadian I didn’t like (apart from Mike Myers),…
Dweebs Shall Inherit the Earth
When it comes to the rock-radio airwaves, forget well-coiffed hipsters or impeccably attired starlets. These days, the geeks have inherited the earth. The popular, chewy, pastoral pop nugget “So Says I” comes from the Shins, four average joes who look more like avid bowlers than talented musicians, while emo upstarts…
Sour Town
If only Dogville were at least involving enough to be perplexing. Sigh. In simplest terms — which it definitely deserves — Lars von Trier’s latest thingamabob is a large pretentious blob of coulda-been. As in, it coulda been deep and insightful. It coulda been sociologically challenging. It coulda been formalistically…
Bob Schneider
Bob Schneider is lonely no more. That’s because he’s dead. I’m Good Now, the title of the album Schneider released this week, refers not to getting healthy or becoming virtuous or resolving emotional conflict. It’s about being dead, shaking free from this worrisome plane, crossing the clouds to the golden…
Big Deal
I am going to give 13 Going on 30 too much credit, though it’s hardly worth the effort; Lord knows the filmmakers didn’t put much into it. It’s a shame, as far as these things go, because what could have been an engaging, maybe even enlightening, story about the unfairly…
Bonnie “Prince” Billy
In the early ’90s, young Louisville, Kentucky, native Will Oldham abandoned a promising career as an actor (he had appeared as the feckless boy preacher in John Sayles’s Matewan) and began releasing purposely obscure, highly personal records. At the beginning he was known as the Palace Brothers; later, it was…
Garden of Good and Evil
Onstage whimsy can curdle faster than a carton of milk left outside on a July afternoon in Houston. After the second scene of In the Garden of Live Flowers, a fantastical take on the life of environmentalist author Rachel Carson, wild insects from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland buzz and…
Murs
While producer 9th Wonder and rapper Murs have taken different paths throughout their careers, they’ve both emerged near the top of the underground rubble. The latter slung his everyman, confessional lyrics for years in his San Francisco Bay Area basement before signing to Def Jux in 2003; the former was…
Capsule Reviews
Birthday from Hell What has six arms, six legs and three heads — and is one of the greatest comedy shows on earth? If you correctly guessed Radio Music Theatre and its three loony creators (Steve Farrell, Vicki Farrell and Rich Mills), then you’re probably still laughing about the latest…
Bye-Bye Bongs?
Going tubing in New Braunfels is a time-honored Texas tradition, but like all Texas traditions that involve actual fun, it’s a bit under fire these days. Authorities have come up with lots of ways to cut down on excessive drinking, and now they’re taking on America’s high-tech upgrade to that…
The Right Footage
The setting of the video looks like a European Sam’s Wholesale with foreign groceries. But the place is trashed. Throughout the store, casually but crisply dressed Europeans are crumbling bags of crunchy processed foods and shredding toilet paper (of course, that crappy European toilet paper should be destroyed). An elderly…
Friends Like These
The Island Snow stand outside the Houston Zoo is lined with bottles of snow cone syrup, each filled with a different color and flavor, from the deep pink of bubble gum to margarita’s acid green. Van DeQuevedo, a youthful 60 in his Texas Longhorns cap, offers 26 flavors in three…
Bad Acid Trip, with GWAR and Watch Them Die
Venerable heavy metal bard Rob Zombie once told me that if music critics — or, better still, fans — really hate you, then you must be on to something, so stick to it. That wonky reasoning is apparently the MO of the band-of-the-week from L.A., Bad Acid Trip, which was…
Capsule Reviews
“The Centaur’s Smile: The Human Animal in Early Greek Art” Centaurs, satyrs, sphinxes, the Minotaur, gorgons and the like are part of the ancient Greek panoply of half-human, half-animal creatures depicted in this exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts. The artifacts provide a stroll back through the stories of…
Carrying the Torch
Chris Wilhite, a red-bearded Sierra Club organizer, straps on his mud boots, climbs out of his Dodge Ram and plunges into a leafy gumbo of creek bottom in the Sam Houston National Forest. He tromps beneath ancient water oaks, mossy basswoods and bright redbuds. Spring ferns are unfurling on the…
Cyndi Lauper
My best friend of more than a quarter-century seems like a normal guy. Married, mortgage, three kids, dogs. He’s even an ordained minister, for Christ’s sake! But beneath that placid exterior lies a raging (and heterosexual) Cyndi Lauper obsessive. He checks her Web site daily, endlessly replays the chair-smashing team-up…
Black Beats, Brown Sounds
Like many Mexicans who are thriving against the odds in the United States, Francisco Gomez cannot believe his good luck. Akwid, the rap duo featuring him and older brother Sergio, was in the Top 20 of the Billboard Latin album chart for dozens of weeks, and Proyecto Akwid was nominated…