Fighting the Renaissance
Maybe there was a time, in his 59 years, when Ross Martella Jr. didn’t want the land his family owns in the Fourth Ward. But he doesn’t remember it. The land isn’t much: 10,000 square feet of a blighted neighborhood, topped by a homeless shelter and a white clapboard fourplex…
Letters
Divining Ballard The State Board of Education appears to be waning, due to a lack of leadership [“Basic Ballard,” by Brian Wallstin, March 13]. The board has a mandate to set policy for public schools. That is a difficult mandate to carry out if one does not believe in public…
Press Picks
thursday april 3 Don your orange and black The Harley-Davidson Traveling Museum, a 48-foot, 18-wheel mobile monu-ment to the great American motorcycle, is here. The rig’s haulage includes the all-new VR-1000 superbike, which has been kicking butt on the AMA circuit, and the vintage Peashooter, whose 1937 Daytona speed record…
Irish Ayes
Let’s get the obvious out of the way at the very beginning: The Irish may be admired for many things — their literature, their music, their gift of gab — but their food is not among them. For a lot of folks, the words “Irish cuisine” are the perfect definition…
Static
From the vaults… I discovered the Velvet Underground in a way that should make the band’s most impassioned devotees cringe. I’d been told by a hip elder cousin that, in light of my immersion in David Bowie and Mott the Hoople, it was only prudent that I find a place…
Still Flying
Roger McGuinn prefers to travel light; two guitars are all he carries, and a 12-string Rickenbacker is always one of them. At an age when many graying rockers are thinking about calling it a career, McGuinn, 54, is busy indulging the same wayfaring fantasy he’s had since he was a…
Funk Historians
Fans of hard-core, Clinton-era (George Clinton, that is) funk should find something — if not everything — about Shag eerily familiar. The multiracial octet is nothing if not a sweaty-assed ’90s encapsulation of Clinton’s P-Funk experience circa 1975 — raw, irreverent, sexually adventurous, socially aware and always danceable. When asked…
Rotation
Matthew Sweet Blue Sky on Mars Zoo/Volcano The disappointment of Blue Sky on Mars cuts two ways. First, there are the songs: Aside from a few hummable gems that transcend time and cliche (“Back Two You,” “All Over My Head,” “Make Believe”), this is the blandest batch of songcraft that…
From Russia, with Love
When Val Kilmer walked away from the Batman franchise, it was only a matter of time before he offered up his own competing brand. The Saint isn’t just his answer to Batman — it’s a full-length commercial for all the Saint movies to come. There’s a breezy effrontery in the…
Abortion for Grins
Nobody is going to accuse writer/director Alexander Payne of being chickenshit. For his first feature, the hilarious Citizen Ruth, he has not only chosen the number-one issue a filmmaker is likely to get killed over — abortion — but made a comedy about it. In Citizen Ruth, Laura Dern stars…
Moving Stories
A line of dancers perched on a long bench laughs soundlessly, and then whispers a line of prose that builds until it’s a collective shout. Like vertebrae on a liquid spine, they shimmy and sway in their seated position, as if moved by an unseen force. The moment is as…
Would You Buy a Revolution From This Man?
Quanell X used to sell drugs for a living, and now he sold revolution. Sitting alone beneath African flags, he still seemed to match his police description: five feet, ten inches tall, 200 pounds, brown hair and, of course, the black skin. The face, with particular attention to nostrils and…
Still Tragic
Long before opening night, the second half of the Alley’s two-part production of The Greeks was saddled with weighty responsibilities. There were narrative strings to tie off and themes to follow through from part one of the epic. But most important, there was an audience to please. And based on…
S R O
Mixing It Up In Brussels, dance performances are as common as chocolate shops. Movement is the city’s prime cultural product, and Brussels supports its dance companies with generous subsidies and large audiences. As a result, plenty of professional dancers and choreographers happily call Brussels home. Houstonian Nancy Henderek discovered all…
The Insider
Over Their Dead Bodies On the evidence of the media feeding frenzy over the past week, editors obviously judged that the public can’t get enough detail on the mass suicide of onetime Houstonian Marshall Herff Applewhite’s millennialist cult. But we know of only one media outlet with the particular promotional…