Ka-Nives, with All-Night Movers and Washington
Slithering out from underneath the bottom of a garbage can come the Ka-Nives, a trio of local rejects with rap sheets that include concurrent or completed sentences in the Jewws, the Fighting Type and Mystery Men. When not engaged in their hobbies of recycling beer cans and drilling glory holes…
A Hanging Offense
The girl’s body was slumped against the back of her bathroom door, a bedsheet knotted tightly around her neck. Instead of a warm, vibrant chocolate skin, hers was the grays and blues of impending death. Her stomach was distended, her eyes unfocused. Joyce Robinson was the first one to spot…
Cry Uncle
It’s been a decade since Uncle Tupelo released its major-label swan song, Anodyne. In the passing years, the Belleville, Illinois, band’s two front men — the sullen, grieving and earnest Jay Farrar and the eager, hoarse and earnest Jeff Tweedy — have seen an entire genre, called alternative country, emerge…
Hail to the Chiefs
To this day, no one knows how or why the Easter Islanders built their massive statues. After years of doing nothing but procreating and lugging massive stones around their tiny island, the Moai people overpopulated their paradise, ran out of food and succumbed to cannibalism. All that remains is their…
¡Viva México!
As with Mexican cooking, many non-Hispanic Texans have entirely the wrong idea about what Mexican music is. The same Anglos who think Mexican food is only hard-shell tacos and chicken fajitas seem to think Mexican music begins and ends with the stuff that’s piped into restaurants where those delicacies are…
The Love of Giants
SportsNewsGlobal writer BEIJING (SNG) — Houston Rockets star Yao Ming comes across as clean-cut as a preppie from a New England boarding school. No earrings. Nice haircut. No tattoos, which is something of a novelty in the NBA. But make no mistake. Yao is making plenty of statements with his…
The Austin Curse
It’s a Texas rock and roll cliché: Young music buffs move to Austin to attend the University of Texas, start a band, graduate (or not) and stick around town to make a go of the group. Some acts, from the Reivers through Fastball and on down to Vallejo, have gone…
Stung
When Kristi Columbus cried after she was not chosen for the Stingarettes drill team at Texas City High School last month, her father initially put it down to disappointment. But when his 15-year-old daughter, an honor student who has her future as a radiologist mapped out, told him she wanted…
The Derailers
Since their inception, the Derailers have pledged allegiance to the Bakersfield sound of Buck Owens, but they’ve always transcended simple retro/kitsch appeal. The two singer/guitarists — Tony Villanueva, with his strong twang, alternating with Brian Hofeldt’s Beatlesque bent — have produced a lot of exciting and underrated music, including 2001’s…
Mail Sacked
For Texas prisoners, there are no phones and no Internet. Convicts communicate the same way people did a century ago: They write letters. Ray Hill, host of radio station KPFT’s The Prison Show, receives about two pounds of mail each week from Texas prisoners. Inmate Mikey Norville wrote Hill on…
The Iguanas
While many bands claim that their sound is a mixture of musical styles but only experiment superficially, the New Orleans-based Iguanas really do slither in and out of many genres. A set might begin with a muscular, horn-fueled ’50s R&B workout, followed by a Tex-Mex bar number sung entirely in…
Letters
Cold Comfort Location, location, location: So what if your body is buried under the wrong headstone? [“Dead Wrong” by Wendy Grossman, April 10]. So what if someone else is buried on top of you or below you? News flash: You are dead. The rotting corpse that will be placed in…
Vig’s Eleven
In Confidence, Edward Burns plays Jake Vig, a con artist whose body temperature runs a few degrees below normal. Even when things seem to go bad, when a would-be partner betrays him with a phone call or a seedy-greedy Dustin Hoffman lays maybe-gay and grubby paws all over him, Burns…
Truth Hurts
University of Texas graduate students Mark Westmoreland and Antony Cherian are not fly-by-night, get-the-story-and-go documentarians. They really got involved with the people of Washington, Texas, for their 48-minute film, Truth I Ever Told. “We went there to film not every other weekend, but every weekend,” says Westmoreland. “We would go…
A Horrible Mind
Director David Cronenberg has led his loyal fans down some pretty spooky corridors, including the telepathic netherworld of Scanners, the violent sibling rivalry of twin gynecologists in love with the same woman (Dead Ringers) and the drug-haunted imagination of William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch). So it comes as no surprise…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, April 24 It’s pretty hard to keep an art collective alive. As every Real World viewer knows, when you put a bunch of creative, passionate people together, things will eventually explode. The high-energy collective Forcefield was founded in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1997. Members were known for donning tight,…
Identity Crisis
You can’t be sure what to make of Identity for its first hour: Director James Mangold’s initial foray into the horror genre plays so much like a joke it’s almost impossible to tell whether he’s making you laugh on purpose or because, well, he’s director James Mangold, maker of the…
An Evening of Torture
The crowd at Amnesty International Theater Project’s “Torture Watch” is likely to be more aware of human rights violations around the globe than your average joe. But John Sullivan, who’s presenting the evening of readings and performances with wife Shelli Rae, doesn’t mind if most of the seats are filled…
True Love Too Late
If you’re one of those darkly romantic types who believes that even if God himself came down and brought you true love you’d just get hit by a Metro bus before you could enjoy it, then La Traviata is the opera for you. It is the quintessential tale of love,…
Dancers and Daredevils
Three shows, one stage Between gorging on traditional Mexican cuisine and browsing the art-and-trinket booths at the International Festival, you’ll want to squeeze in some entertainment time. So stake out a spot by the AT&T Amazing Arts Stage (at the corner of Bagby and McKinney, on the edge of Sam…
Everybody Loves ABBA
Through April 27 at the Hobby Center, 800 Bagby, 713-629-3700. $37.25-$77.25.
The Trip to Bountiful
Through May 10 at the Alley Theatre, 615 Texas Avenue, 713-228-9341. $35-$50.
Water Landing
They’re all wet at Red Bull’s Flugtag in Austin Flugtag means “flying day” in German. But it really means “splashing day” in Austin (“splooshtag?”). Produced by Red Bull, this weekend’s Flugtag combines the spirit of invention and competition with a taste for the absurd. Teams with names like Chicken-Pult and…
Wednesday Brunch
Xiu mai (four): $2.65 Shrimp dumplings (four): $2.65 Turnip pudding: $1.95 Squab and lettuce leaves: $12.95 Lunch special: $4.75
License to Entertain
Comedic License teaches kids to make ’em laugh Soon school will be out for the summer, and class clowns will be left without an audience. Three months of goofs unmet by guffaws? What ever will they do? Some parents will try various doses of Ritalin. But other ones, who see…
Food in the Nude
The soft-shell crawfish in the taquito appetizer ($8) at Artista (800 Bagby, 713-226-7827) looks like the centerfold spread of an erotic shellfish magazine. Every scrap of exoskeleton has been carefully removed, and the nude remainder of rosy flesh lies appealingly on a soft flour tortilla instead of a bearskin rug…
A Really Bad Apple
Break out the glitter and watch this bomb explode If you’ve got a taste for bad, bad movies, don’t sit at home with the VCR when you could be among your kind at this weekend’s screening of Menahem Golan’s legendary bomb The Apple. The film, which premiered at Cannes in…
Jay Hooks
Jesus himself said that no man is a prophet in his own hometown, and very often that proverb can be applied to musicians as well. Ask Jay Hooks. While the blues-rock shredder plays to audiences of hundreds and even thousands across Europe, it’s mostly small clubs and sports bars once…
Don’t Faint
Warning: Band may induce seizures The Faint comes out of Omaha, Nebraska — not the most likely city to spawn one of the best electronic/rock acts since the Human League or New Order. Originally conceived as a low-fi rock outfit, the five-piece group gradually became interested in the electronic instruments…
The End of the World As We Know It
“Turn out the lights, the party’s over. They say that all good things must end.” So sang Willie Nelson a long time ago, and while Earthwire impresario M. Martin is no singer or much of a country fan, he sounds pretty similar to the Red Headed Stranger these days. Or…