In the Land of Dilbert
Richard Dresser’s Below the Belt, currently premiering in Houston at Stages, takes on corporate America. You know corporate America: Every Dilbert doodad from bumper stickers to T-shirts to bookmarks to comic strips thumb-tacked to the company coffee cart tells you how much it sucks. Those bastions of greed and power…
Feel for the Real
In recent years, the throbbing, roots-oriented style that dominated reggae’s formative decade has given way to a more modern adaptation: Strutting and synthesized, dancehall is to Rastafarian-inspired reggae what disco is to the deep soul sounds of Wilson Pickett or Otis Redding. But dancehall is also what’s most happening these…
Money Changes Everything
Is the opposite of offhand onhand? If so, The Spanish Prisoner is the most onhand movie since Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. The writer/director, David Mamet, delights in his own supposed cleverness; he wants you to scratch your head while he manipulates your brain. Campbell Scott plays a researcher in…
Star Power and Substance
Baaba Maal provided the African celebrity glitter at this year’s International Festival, but a pair of lesser-known emigrants from that continent may well equal the Senegalese superstar in substance. Sally Nyolo and Ricardo Lemvo have taken routes that differ from those of most artists with Afro-pop credentials, but despite their…
Double Timing
Gwyneth Paltrow gets another chance to show off her letter-perfect English accent in Sliding Doors, an engaging romantic comedy that employs a novel narrative device: After introducing the main characters and setting up the basic story, the film splits into two separate but parallel plot lines. It’s a twist reminiscent…
Static
Raves and wave-offs… Technically, Island Romance, the new CD from Houston’s Irie Time, could be considered a rerelease — that is, if its like-named 1991 antecedent was ever officially available in the first place. Like the biracial reggae quartet’s other past releases, that first record was sold only at the…
Promiscuous Prudes
In writer/director James Toback’s quicksilver sex comedy Two Girls and a Guy, Robert Downey, Jr., plays Blake Allen, a struggling New York actor who lives in a spacious loft in SoHo he probably can’t afford. He’s a pampered prince who has worked out for himself a cozy romantic subterfuge: He…
In the Pink
There are few good cartoons in the New Yorker anymore, but I did enjoy one that ran last month. A man and a woman are standing at the door of their apartment seeing off the last of their guests, one of whom says to the hostess: “The crab bisque, the…
Played Out
By all appearances, KRBE/104.1 FM is a station thoroughly immersed in a keen sense of its own well-being. An aggressively sunny, self-satisfied vibe greets visitors to the Top 40 giant’s offices near Westheimer and Gessner. Up there on the seventh floor, the waiting area could be mistaken for an oversized…
Dish
Movin’ On Up on the South Side Thai food fans take note: One of Houston’s best-kept secrets has moved uptown. Well, sort of. Kanomwan is still tucked away on that Twilight Zone stretch of Telephone Road between the Gulf Freeway and downtown, but in January, it moved up the road…
A Bitter Pill
Houston entrepreneur Mark Wilson is on a crusade to let the world in on what he calls the Food and Drug Administration’s “dirty little secret” — namely, that so-called alcohol-free medicines aren’t alcohol-free at all. He’s invested his time, money and career in proving that two inventions of his are…
After-School Limbo
It’s 3:30 in the afternoon, the bell sounds and 1,400 kids are released from Johnston Middle School. Norman Rockwell time — haven’t we all seen that picture? But not all the kids at this Westbury-area school are running joyously home, being picked up by school buses or chauffeured to lessons…
Hotel Whitewash
You don’t normally think of millionaire property manager/developer Wayne Duddlesten as a civil-rights leader, but he sure sounded like one back in October 1995, as he pitched City Council members on why his plan to build the $150 million downtown convention center hotel was superior to that of rival JMB…
Road Work
Jennifer McKay, organizer of this year’s Bank United Art Car Parade Powered by Pennzoil, was right on the money when she cautioned the Press last week that macho art cars are often more about potential than reality [“Art Car Macho,” April 16]. Only one of the four art cars Mike…
Two Thumbs Up
Film critic Peter Rainer, whose work appears in the Houston Press, was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, the Columbia University School of Journalism announced Tuesday. Rainer, who is based at the Press’s sister paper the L.A. New Times, is a longtime Los Angeles film writer and…
Letters
Won’t Step Foot on Madison High Campus Again This letter is written to applaud your effort in letting the public know about Warner Ervin, the principal of Madison High School [“Power to the Principal,” by Shaila Dewan, April 2]. I have two children who graduated from Madison under his reign…
Cooking with Shange
The name of Ntozake Shange (that’s “En-toe-zak-ee Shang-gay”) will be forever attached to that of her most famous play, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. Written by a very young Shange (in her early twenties), the play opened to huge critical acclaim in 1976…
Night & Day
thursday april 23 The 27th annual Houston International Festival might be called Six Banners Over the Bayou; it features a sextet of “entertainment zones” — Caribbean, African, Latin, American, Texas and Kids — and more big-name entertainment than you can shake a dreadlock at. Free lunchtime concerts are scheduled today…
Death Camp
Just when you thought we’d run out of labels for newly amalgamated sounds, here comes death lounge. To date, Dallas’s Necro-Tonz have dibs on the genre, and it’s likely to stay that way — though the band deserves credit for the sheer balls to pull off such a limited premise…
Hot Plate
There are two things you need to know about the adobe pie ($6.50) at Mesa Grill (1971 West Gray, 520-8900). One, it doesn’t contain any adobe, and two, all assumptions to the contrary, it isn’t cooked in adobe, either. So why the name? For some reason, that was something no…
Vainglorious
What is it about Beaumont that gets those creative carbines churning? Maybe it’s the stinking petrol sediment forever fouling the humid Gulf air, or the cultural blight that resides comfortably on its bleak streets. Whatever. The talent that has emerged from within and around its borders is startling, to say…
Rotation
Aretha Franklin A Rose Is Still a Rose Arista On initial inspection, A Rose Is Still a Rose seems like an aging legend’s desperate attempt to work her way into the contemporary R&B mix by enlisting help from some of today’s hottest, hippest producers. But if that were the case,…
Clubland
For three years, the building at 2727 Crossview that once housed Birraporetti’s stood vacant. These days, former patrons of that Italian eatery would never recognize the place. For starters, there’s a vast bar and cocktail area, lavish balcony and dining room, hand-gilded gold columns, an oval hardwood dance floor and…
Elling’s Rant
It seems only appropriate that Kurt Elling is performing an artists’ benefit when he comes to Houston Thursday. A Grammy-nominated singer and die-hard Jack Kerouac fan, the 30-year-old jazz singer is outspoken, to say the least, about the importance of funding for education in the arts. “How many choirboys go…