The Boom Boom Method
Months after the spanking, Erik Vidor’s bruised butt made the evening news on six different stations. Some showed a whole wall of bruise photos, arrayed in rows at a press conference. Most showed close-ups of the snapshot, and Channel 2 drew nearer still, filling the screen with one mottled cheek…
Excellence Honored
Houston Press staff writer Michael Berryhill was named “Print Journalist of the Year” in the Press Club of Houston’s 1997 Excellence in Journalism competition. It was the second year in a row that a Press writer received the Press Club’s top reporting award for newspapers with circulations of more than…
Smile! It’s Earth Day!
Laser Bleaching, complimentary consultation,” read the back of the business card distributed by volunteers manning the Laser Whitening tent at last week’s Enron Earth Day celebration. After scouring the “Introducing BriteSmile Laser Tooth Whitening” brochure and fact sheet, though, the connection between a laser-enhanced smile and Earth Day remained a…
The Insider
Rocks in Their Heads Japanese rock garden is supposed to inspire feelings of peace and tranquillity. But the rock garden in Hermann Park seems to have had the opposite effect on the city’s Parks and Recreation Department hierarchy, which apparently views the five-and-a-half-acre garden as if it were full of…
Letters
Too soft I found a glaring omission in your piece on Dennis Lange [“Lange’s Way,” by Hobart Rowland, March 27]. Many of the clubs in which Lange’s “cover bands” play regularly advertise in the Press. This is not meant as an accusation, but perhaps that fact either consciously or unconsciously…
Press Picks
thursday april 24 Two Trains Running Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner August Wilson says of his play: “There are always two trains running. There is life and there is death. Each of us rides them both.” His characters are on the first half of that metaphorical journey, contemplating their dreams and…
Hot for Sauce
There are memories of pivotal moments in life that are branded deeply on the brain: first kiss, first spin of a T-Bone Walker album, first car, first time leaving home. If you’re lucky, there’s another memory you can add to that list: first taste of the barbecue sauce at C…
Corrosive Talent
Wondering why the multimillion-selling Metallica chose the relatively little-known Corrosion of Conformity as their touring partners? Maybe it’s because, whatever you may say about their limp Load or new Lollapalooza hairdos, the guys in Metallica know good music when they hear it. Or maybe, having been slagged for swirling different…
Fixed Up
As she slid inconspicuously onto the stage at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion last September, Shawn Colvin seemed determined not to draw too much attention to herself. This was, after all, a baby step in the scheme of things, a modest clearing of the throat after two years of relative…
Mussorgsky Unplugged
Broadway shows and movies aren’t the only things that are endlessly tinkered with before they’re presented to the public in what’s supposed to be their final form. Operas, too, undergo revisions, and few have been as frequently revised as Modest Mussorgsky’s masterpiece, Boris Godunov. Mussorgsky himself was involved in some…
The Girl in the Glasses
If you’re looking for yet more evidence of just how isolated America is from the rest of the world — and how desperate the rest of the world is to break through that isolation — all you have to do is check out Nana Mouskouri. A Greek native who’s been…
On the Fringe
The great frustration of being a lover of alternative theater is being limited — by geography or vacation dollars — to the amount of risky fare available in any given city. It was just such a frustration that, 50 years ago, led the alternative theater artists in Scotland to band…
Static
Is dead horse dead meat? In a word, yes. And this time, it appears, the Houston band has finally taken the proverbial stake through the heart. No more last-gasp reorganizations, no more resurrections; I’ve been assured by its founders that this time it’s really over — finito, done, kaput –…
Separation Anxiety
When invited into the homes of the very rich, one has certain expectations: a peek at the art collection; a little wistful envy over the quality of the surroundings; the hope that the cook will be making dinner. When invited into the homes of the very rich under the guise…
Sound Check
There’s something about us rock geeks that makes us need to organize and categorize and rank every damn piece of music we own — and certainly no entertainment product is as fetishized as the rock album. What’s more, perhaps only sports nuts rival rock fans in their obsessive-compulsive quest for…
Prisoners of Bore
No one exploited the historical-epic form better than David Lean. At his peak, he used its spaciousness and breadth to develop characters with conflicting points of view, so that audiences could feel viscerally swept away, emotionally engaged and mentally sharpened — all at once. With the help of inspired actors,…
Stiffed
On the festival-and-promo tour that helped the necrophiliac Kissed net advance praise everywhere from the Atlantic Monthly to Newsweek, writer/director Lynne Stopkewich said she thought independent films should be judged on their ingenuity and daring rather than on the size of their budgets. As arts-world stump speeches go, it’s a…
I Lava L.A.!
If you think that all the ills of the planet can be traced to the stench from the movie, record and television industries, and that Los Angeles is, therefore, Sin City incarnate, then Volcano could prove a peak experience. The movie is set in L.A., and audiences may well get…
“A Flaky Deal”
The children were tested for lead poisoning last July, during a routine visit to the neighborhood health clinic. Drop-lets of blood from their forefingers were drawn into small tubes and sent off for analysis to a lab at the city of Houston’s Department of Health and Human Services. When the…