Jason Goes to Space
From the get-go, there has been an appealing pugnacity to the Friday the 13th horror movies. Sure, this enduring franchise launched in 1980 as a marginally clever knockoff of Halloween and Black Christmas, but in the annals of American pop cinema, the sequels revealed a devil-may-care brattiness all their own…
Wet Dreamer
It should come as little surprise that Andrew W.K. loves roller coasters. “You’re from Ohio; are you a big Cedar Point fan?” the Detroit native asks during a phone interview, referring to the northern Ohio amusement park known as the Roller Coaster Capital of the World. Andrew’s excitement level rises…
Cat Fight
Poor William Randolph Hearst. The snapping dogs of Hollywood just won’t leave the guy alone. It’s been barely 60 years since a little epic called Citizen Kane portrayed the great newspaper tycoon as a ruthless dictator who degenerated into an emotional basket case, and already there’s more bad publicity in…
People Who Died
Listening to Firewater’s 2001 release, Psychopharmacology, conjures thoughts of Jim Carroll, but after a couple of spins it’s still hard to pinpoint why. There are no ready-made comparisons of Carroll to Firewater front man Todd A. in the latter’s press kit, nor is Todd A. a basketball star/junkie/poet likely to…
Forever Young
Czech composer Leos Janácek must have been fascinated by “bad girls.” His early-20th- century opera trilogy magnifies the travails of women who violate social mores. But while the heroines in Katya Kabanova and Jenufa are sympathetic characters, the lead in Houston Grand Opera’s current production, The Makropulos Case, has little…
Ozzy Lore
If ever more proof was needed that This Is Spinal Tap was the most perfect satire ever made, we have this moment from MTV’s smash-hit reality TV series, The Osbournes: Proud wife Sharon is showing off the stage set for Ozzy’s Merry Mayhem tour. There are real-live dwarves, face-painted like…
It’s All Relative
The best part of Alan Ayckbourn’s House and Garden is its novelty. The two plays run at the same time on two stages, and their syncopated stories are performed by the same cast, which requires a bit of racing up and down stairs by the boisterous actors at the Alley…
Faith Evans
Sean P. “Doo-Wah-Diddy” Combs better thank the Lord on a daily basis that he still has Faith Evans in his corner. The invincible shine of his Bad Boy Records empire doesn’t gleam as brightly as it did back in its mid-’90s prime. Those days when Craig Mack, Total, Mase, the…
Seeing Is Disbelieving
It’s an old joke: The wife catches the husband kissing another woman, and when he denies it, she sputters, “But I saw you with my own eyes!” Fast on his feet, the husband responds, “Well, who’re you gonna believe? Your own husband? Or your lying eyes?” It’s a favorite because…
Pimpadelic
Generally speaking, it’s a bad idea to have “motherfucker” tattooed on the side of your neck. Don’t even think we have to get the churchgoers out there to back us up on this one. Tattoo? No problem. On your neck? Kinda sketchy. “Motherfucker”? All signs point to no. But that’s…
Lazarus, Reborn
Peter Bogdanovich, maybe the last man alive who wears a neckerchief without irony, holds a copy of a newspaper article in which his old friend Larry McMurtry is saying nice, or not nice, things about him–Bogdanovich can’t tell which. “He’s kind of risen from the dead,” McMurtry was quoted as…
Shemekia Copeland
With vocal power and emotional projection that belie her 24 years, Copeland is a brassy blues shouter in the tradition of Ruth, Etta and Koko. But those influences are a starting point — and not a boundary — for the daughter of late Houston bluesman Johnny Clyde Copeland. This dynamo…
Rock-A-Baby Bye-Bye
Clarissa Santana spreads a bath towel on the blue carpet, takes off her boxers and lies down on the love seat. Biting down on a throw pillow, she stifles her screams, trying not to wake her mother and her 16-month-old son sleeping in the next room. In labor ten hours…
Asian Cajuns
While I’m waiting for a couple of pounds of boiled crawfish at Cajun Corner restaurant, I notice a young Vietnamese-American guy approach the little table covered with condiments near the front counter. He dumps several tablespoons of a ground red pepper into a small bowl, then he squirts in mayonnaise…
Pam’s Last Stand
The delivery woman standing outside the pink building at 2700 Albany Street is confused. She’s supposed to be making a stop at the studio of photographer Pam Francis, who offices here. But it doesn’t seem like anyone could even get inside this place, much less run a business out of…
Needling the Mayor
Houston physician Richard Evans is convinced that it is good medicine to collect used syringes from junkies and provide clean ones, to prevent the spread of AIDS. At a recent international conference on drug policy held at Rice University, Evans saw an opportunity to sound out Lee Brown on the…
Anatomy of an Attempted Whitewash
Hamilton Middle School on East 20th Street provides a beacon to the gentrifying middle- and upper-income neighborhoods of the Heights for parents who want their children educated in public rather than private schools. According to Hamilton parents, 33-year-old first-year principal Kenneth Gerard Goeddeke was the school’s foremost ambassador and salesman…
Bursting Bubbles
It was pretty much a run-of-the-mill health report on Channel 13’s 5 p.m. news April 17. Reporter Christi Myers told viewers of a possible breakthrough in curing what’s popularly known as Bubble Boy disease. As she provided details, film clips were shown of David Vetter, the Houston-area kid who suffered…
Tut TUTS
Tut TUTS Broaden the lineup: Encore! Encore [“Les Passé,” by Richard Connelly, April 11]! Finally, someone has the balls to print what I’ve been saying about Theatre Under the Stars since I moved to the Bayou City 16 years ago. Being a big theater fan, I bought season tickets for…
Airborne Again
Some might deny that Galveston is a center of aviation history. But those naysayers have never heard of Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan, the man who earned international fame when he somehow managed to end up in Ireland after attempting to fly from New York to the West Coast. He was…
Alanis Morissette
Under Rug SweptMaverick
Tales from the Crip
“Now, I do not recommend going out, finding a physically challenged person and saying, ‘Hey, Crip,’ ” Claire Theriot Mestepey writes, of the nickname lovingly given to her by her eclectic group of friends known as the Crip Club. “This is not a good thing. In fact, I’d label it…
Casino
Casino may record for a label called Fancy Music, but its music is anything but. Affluenza is Brit-style raunch and roll. More specifically, most of the bands Casino calls to mind (Stone Roses, Charlatans, Oasis) come from “Madchester” circa 1990, when the gritty red-brick northern English metropolis was the ecstasy-and-lager-fueled…
A Mojito Without the Mint
El Buen Bife Grill (4527 Lomitas, 713-523-6373) has a terrible location — in the shadow of the Southwest Freeway at Kirby, blocked almost entirely by Bennigan’s — but the Argentinean restaurant packs them in anyway with its gorgeous and muy auténtico-looking waitstaff. The men speak with heavy accents and wear…
Dead Actress Walking
The thoroughly unlikable heroine of Life or Something Like It is a vain, actressy bleached blond in the employ of a Seattle TV station. To call her a “reporter” is to defame reporters. Her hair spray outweighs her brain, and everything in her life — from her obsessive workouts at…
Fruity-Patootie
Since 1889, when the classic Pizza Margherita, named in honor of the queen of Italy, was created at the Pizzeria di Pietro in Naples, people have been topping their pies with the strangest things. How about Peking duck, chili, tofu, oysters, tuna, squid, eel, guacamole or dandelion leaves? If those…