Crowes Feat
Well, you certainly have to give The Black Crowes credit for having cojones the size of the Georgia Dome. (And that’s one cojon per stadium). For emblazoned across the front of the Atlanta band’s press kit and all over its clippings is the phrase “The Most Rock n’ Roll Rock…
Letters
Mice Touch I was starting to think I was the only one left who gave a rat’s ass [“Cutting Class,” by Margaret Downing, April 15]! Greg Self via Internet Chain Saw Massacre Thank you for presenting an important lesson in conservation. The absurdity of cutting down trees and destroying a…
New Old 97’s
Old 97’s — For the last couple of years it has been normal to belly up to the bar at the Fabulous Satellite Lounge, order a beer, light a smoke and casually wait for Old 97’s to take the stage. And for as much as you’ve grown used to readying…
News of the Weird
Lead Stories *According to an April New York Times report, the purchase price in Japan of giant stag beetles has dropped recently to about $300 from a typical price in the early 1990s of about $6,000. The beetles, which resemble four-inch-long cockroaches, are traditional Japanese pets that, according to insect…
Drums of Injustice
The civil rights movement played out in the streets of urban America. And TV cameras rolled, forever capturing the violence accompanying that fight. But some of that crusade happened far from the public eye, in small, intimate places, involving the most unlikely of characters.Thomas Meloncon’s The Drums of Sweetwater, at…
Left Standing at the Church Door
Go to Bering Memorial United Methodist Church and prepare to be greeted with open arms. Join in the worship. Pray, sing, listen to the sermon, go to Sunday school, get counseling, enjoy the fellowship and go to communion. But don’t count on getting married there. Now or in the next…
The Poetry Winners
So this dirty, sultry, apartment-hived swamp of a city breathes and seethes life after all. The call went out and you responded. We wanted poetry, we got it. By the truckload. The blues was the first bona fide American poetic form, and a powerful one at that. Our first-place winner,…
Cosby Says the Darndest Things
Try doing a Bill Cosby routine at the water cooler sometime. You’ll fail miserably. Cosby doesn’t have a battery of one-liners; he doesn’t even tell jokes per se. His humor sneaks up on you: Somewhere in his slow telling of a story you discover by accident that your sides are…
Object Lesson
For a while now I’ve been mentally mapping out what I call my Color Tour of Houston, a project whose merit I hope our Convention and Visitors Bureau will come to recognize as a celebration of the diversity of the city’s taste in paint. There’s the bungalow around the block…
No Parking
The dizzying tide of diners and dancers crowding downtown’s sidewalks most every night of the week might embody a developer’s wildest dream, but the crush of cars is turning into a nightmare for customers and smaller businesses alike. The problem is particularly painful in the vicinity of Market Square, designed…
Mood Over Matter
A quality documentary will not only draw in viewers with an interesting story, it will explain and explore the world it is trying to document. When the film is over, viewers will not only have been entertained, they will have learned something new. Maverick’s, a film about the beautiful sport…
Hot Plate
B’stilla my heart: It throbs with love for the sultry Moroccan ancestor of chicken pot pie called b’stilla ($6.95), served up at Mi Luna Tapas Restaurant & Bar [2441 University Boulevard, (713)520-5025]. Layers upon layers of crisp phyllo pastry form a delicate golden dome sheltering three distinct strata of filling:…
No Pain, No Gain
Choreographer Paul Taylor’s not a happy man. His dances are filled with anger and sadness — even his happiest, everything-is-beautiful ballet has a family scene where everyone reaches out but nobody touches. His couples break up in the end because that’s the way life is, Taylor says. We break up,…
Give Pita a Chance
A friend from Chicago recently complained that he couldn’t find a decent falafel sandwich here, nothing like the ones they make in the Windy City. Surprised, and a little huffy on Houston’s behalf, I rattled off a dozen places that serve falafel without even thinking outside the Loop. “No, you…
Caught in the Act
Sean Connery has always been a terse, minimalist actor, spitting out his lines in tight bursts of Scottish brogue. But in Entrapment, the kingly Scot goes beyond minimalism to the point where he’s practically doing semaphore with his eyebrows. As the legendary art thief Robert MacDougal, Connery isn’t just reserved,…
Et tu, Lenny
Paul McCartney and Duran Duran did it for James Bond. The Bee Gees followed Tony Manero’s lead. And even Survivor got into the ring. The marriage between established rock stars and movie characters has produced songs of widely varying quality and impact. But this summer a natural pair will get…
Night & Day
Thursday April 29 The Duplex may be tiny, but it houses two of the best modern dance companies in town: Fly, the athletic five-man hip-hop phenomenon, and Suchu Dance, the smart and wacky little troupe led by deadpan dancer/choreographer Jennifer Wood. Both groups will dance in the postage stamp-size space…
Tap Defiance
Savion Glover and George C. Wolfe brainstormed a whole new kind of musical back in May 1995. Before Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk, tap dancing — from the street corners of New Orleans to the sound stages of Los Angeles — was pure entertainment. “[It] wasn’t being…
Hands Up
The most surprising thing about the new teensploitation horror film Idle Hands is the lack of masturbation jokes. It is a movie about a 17-year-old boy who loses control of his right hand to an evil demon, yet there’s only one such obvious crack. As the gloriously lazy hero Anton…
Border Bound
A commercial truck carrying bottled water rumbles up the rocky street, stopping in front of one of the 25 or so homes in a listless neighborhood in the town of Socorro, ten miles east of El Paso. The driver slings a water jug over his shoulder and drops it on…
Monkey Business
The chart of the company’s stock had always been a black line slithering along the ground like a snake. Almost no one noticed it, and those who did weren’t tempted to pick it up. The line continued its dull progress, and it seemed that nothing extraordinary would ever happen to…
Rotation
Van Morrison Back On Top Virgin/Pointblank In his first album of new material since 1997’s The Healing Game, visionary Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison declares himself to be Back On Top. And in a commercial sense, perhaps he is, given his recent affiliation with industry megagiant Virgin Records. But artistically, Van…
Digging Up the Dirt
One can imagine Bob Lanier testifying before the grand jury about the excesses of the Department of Public Works during his administration. As far as he knew, Lanier might mumble sincerely, Jimmie Schindewolf and his fine staff did a great job implementing the mayor’s program to upgrade Houston’s infrastructure, the…
My Kinda Sound
Although fans of the rich blues heritage of Texas and other regions may sometimes bristle at being passed over in historical surveys, one fact is indisputable: No single city is more important to the hugely influential sound of modern blues than sweet home Chicago. Since it functioned as a kind…
Roping In Ratings
A television tuned to KTMD-Channel 48 provides recent news on NATO air strikes. The next message updates viewers on another skirmish in a war much closer to home: the battle for credibility and viewer ratings in Houston’s Hispanic community. “EDITORIAL 48” fills the screen, followed by the scene of general…
Atonal Tolstoy
During the first few scenes of Houston Grand Opera’s world premiere of Resurrection, a hedonistic, indulgent prince is smitten with an orphaned servant girl at a dance. Alone with him in her bedroom, the girl demurs, begging for love in tuneful pleas, but he resists. He wants passion. Advancing clumsily…
News Hostage
Love Is Blind, Part 1 Love is blind, they say, and no one falls in love harder than the Houston Chronicle when it’s writing about supposed local business successes. A month ago it was Landry’s Seafood. The restaurant chain’s owner, Tilman Fertitta, is a mainstay of the paper’s gossip columns,…