Press Picks
thursday april 28 Brewpub opens A certain sort has been waiting years for Houston to have another brewpub. Now, we get a brewpub and more. The fresh, unique, brewed-on-the-premises beverages at the Village Brewery include Amber Owl (whither nutty brown Cougar? red Tiger?); Houston Wheat, a light-bodied beer served with…
Rotation
Carolyn Wonderland and the Imperial Monkeys Truck Stop Favorites Volume 2 (cassette) Pulse Productions If you’ve been following the Monkeys’ frequent live performances of the past year, you already know that the band has been writing new songs, and here they are — seven co-written by Wonderland and guitarist Eric…
Sprawling Toward Spunk
Sprawl may have played their last Houston show on the 15th, but the long strange trip wasn’t over till the band had filled an obligation at the Metropolis in Lafayette, Louisiana the next night. If Sprawl’s Fitzgerald’s swan song had all the earmarks of a triumphant departure, the Lafayette gig…
Live Shots
Atomic Opera Goat’s Head Soup Saturday, April 16 First there was King’s X, then Galactic Cowboys, now Atomic Opera. By all rights, the three bands should have patented a sound — crunch/thrash rhythms, detailed melodies and Beatlesque harmonies — as distinctly Houston as grunge is Seattle or hair spray was…
Nail Noise
Trent Reznor, the one-man angst factory behind (and in front of) Nine Inch Nails, has gained widespread critical praise for introducing the confessional “I” to industrial/ dance production, which I suppose makes him something of a modern-day noise folkie in fishnets. Which isn’t to say that you should cancel your…
Teresa’s Treasures
Ambivalence seeps like an uneasy vapor from the subdued cocktail-party crowd prowling Hart Galleries’ vast second floor this Tuesday night. Everyone’s motives are suspect. Ostensibly the odd gumbo of academic, artsy and cafe-society types has paid $50 a head to attend an auction preview benefiting the University of Houston art…
Hot plate
Blond on Blond Nielsen’s is the Marilyn Monroe of Houston delicatessens — pale, creamy and voluptuous, talisman of a quaint era in which goddesses had meat on their bones and nobody discussed cholesterol. Remember when mayo wasn’t a four-letter word? Nielsen’s does. The secret weapon at this narrow closet at…
On the Blues Highway
Soul singer Trudy Lynn was born, raised and graduated from high school in Houston’s Fifth Ward. Since that time, her voice has taken her around the world, from Thailand to Belgium and most places in between. Lynn doesn’t often play showcase dates in her hometown, where she still lives, out…
The Dallas Version
I could have sworn I was in Dallas. Mesa’s pared-down decor certainly said so, its sleek vanilla planes lit by Japanesey boxes and technoid Italian snakes. So did the young women at the next table, their teeny-tiny cardigan sets shrink-wrapped, their geometrically clipped heads bent over copies of Vogue and…
Mamet Goes to College
“Higher education is ritualized annoyance.” That’s a professor trying to explain to his student why the course lectures may seem confusing, unorthodox, even enraging. But he might as well be speaking for the playwright, David Mamet, and his Oleanna, which is currently receiving a faithfully blistering production on the Alley’s…
Jesus Is Just Alright
Religious hypocrisy is the subject of Houston playwright Michael Morrow’s The Secret Tapes of Jesus, given its premiere this month at the newly opened Westheimer Art Bar & Theatre. Subtitled “A Consciousness Comedy,” The Secret Tapes is a mordant satire of the limits of conventional morality in the face of…
The Little Triumph That Couldn’t
If you had a great-sounding name like Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, it would behoove you — indeed, you’d almost seem destined — to pen something worthwhile. This important 18th-century French writer of sophisticated romantic comedies did: La Vie de Marianne, among others. He was not triumphant, however, with…
Amazing Cleveland
Drive north on Highway 59 toward the forest and lake district of east Texas, out past the master-planned communities and shopping malls under development. The superhighway bypasses old timber towns such as Porter, New Caney and Splendora before it chugs down to a few traffic lights in Cleveland, giving you…
Playing by the Numbers
The scope of French film has certainly narrowed in recent years. If a movie is Gallic, odds are that it deals with the problems of making art, preferably music. Oh, the film may also touch on the complexities of combining art-making with a problematic love affair, but films from La…
Crazy Child
Attending a 9:30 a.m. screening of the concert movie You So Crazy sounded like the downside of film reviewing. Citizens normally have little sympathy for a critic’s bad day at work, but I could imagine even the most heartless of moviegoers (at least those who share something like my own…
A Hard Case of the Blues
Three months ago, Glendora Wilson walked home from work to find a blues fan standing on the porch of her Third Ward home. The fan was there to show her an ad in Living Blues, the world’s most respected journal of African American roots music. It was an ad she…
Letters
Rebuffed at the Buffet “Mickey’s back!” So began Alison Cook’s gushing review of Khyber, the new restaurant specializing in North Indian cuisine [Cafe, “Karma Veranda,” April 14]. Indeed, Mickey’s back was about all we saw of Khyber on our recent visit there, for though he was standing in the doorway…