This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, April 3 When you’re feeling fat, it’s always nice to see someone who’s fatter than you. It especially helps if the fatso in question is also beautiful. Colombian artist Fernando Botero first worked with a plus-size subject in 1956. Since then, he’s made a name for himself across the…
The Gonzalo Rubalcaba Trio
An envious Herbie Hancock once joked that he wanted to break his more skilled rival Gonzalo Rubalcaba’s fingers, or at the very least, encase them in cement. But while Hancock’s brand of jazz has reaped millions by being accessible to a wide audience (there’s something to say for having melodies…
WorldFest Keeps on Turning
What makes an “indie” film indie? Hunter Todd, director of WorldFest Houston International Film and Video Festival, thinks lots of movies billed as independent films are really anything but. Take the movies shown at Sundance. “Sundance, which started out as a purely indie film festival, has emerged as a showcase…
Wrong Number
A man, peering through the scope of a sniper’s rifle muffled by a silencer, holds hostage someone he considers an evildoer. They communicate via telephone: The sniper insists that if his prey disconnects for any reason, he will shoot to kill. To prove he is serious, not merely a lunatic…
Pulling Stunts
Houston may not be known for its film industry, but it’s here all right, and we’ve got the Houston Stuntmen’s Association to prove it. Need someone to jump through glass? Oscar Carles, the association’s president, is your man. He’s never been seriously hurt performing a stunt, but, says Carles, “if…
Girls with Balls
It was only in 1967 that Great Britain struck from its jurisprudence the “common scold,” essentially a crime of catty insolence for which the convicted party — almost always a woman disturbing the peace by nagging a man — was punished via a public dunking into cold water. Nobody likes…
To Every Man a Donkey Kong
SAT 4/5 Remember the hazy darkness of real arcades? Before PlayStation or Xbox, there was the growl of the Pole Position engine, and the whoosh that sounded at each new level of Tempest. Even better, there was the bounce of the little silver sphere in a game called pinball. If…
The Kids Aren’t Alright
Even under our current government, drugs are still something of a problem in society, which means that the rockin’ and reelin’ Spun hasn’t arrived too late to buzz with significance. In modern pop culture, being young, hooked, miserable, depraved and endlessly self-pitying reached its zenith of coolness about a decade…
Learn a Lot from a Dummy
SUN 4/6 While puppets’ voices are hidden, dummies are inextricably tied to their masters — which is, of course, one reason why ventriloquism is so creepy. Its practitioners are like weird, dwarf/slave owners who tote their imaginary “friends” around, constantly arguing with them. Done well, though, it’s an impressive, even…
A Grand Guy
March 21, 2003–though he never knew the precise date, it was the very day Nile Southern had been waiting for longer than he cared to remember. On that day, Southern went into the Chelsea Mini-Storage facility on Manhattan’s West Side, grabbed the largest dolly he could find–it looked like a…
Rules of the Game
To make megabucks in the music business, it’s a good idea to have your fingers in more than one pie. Rap artists design clothes; rock stars buy restaurants. It’s all about the Benjamins, baby. Houston-based Omni Distribution has jumped in the game, too. For the past five years, in addition…
Go West
The legendary Mae West is alive and well and vamping across the boards at Stages Repertory Theatre in Dirty Blonde, a funny, tender production about America’s first out-there sex goddess and the fans who love her still. Written by Claudia Shear, the hybrid musical travels from past to present and…
Good Folk
SAT 4/5 Caroline Herring may have been raised in the small agricultural community of Canton, Mississippi, but she doesn’t have the background of your typical folksy musician. The daughter of a librarian and an attorney, Herring didn’t grow up with a banjo on her knee. In fact, she was an…
This Must Be Pop
It’s difficult to remember now why Jasper Johns’s flag paintings, Andy Warhol’s Campbell soup cans and Roy Lichtenstein’s comic strip panels were so startling when they first appeared. At the time, these subjects, much like landscape in early 19th-century France, were not considered “exalted” enough for art. But for the…
Bibim Bap’s Rap
Bibim bap: $7.95 Stone bowl bibim bap: $9.95 Bulgogi: $10.95 Boneless ribs: $12.95 Seafood pancake: $10.95 Family-style barbecue (for four): $49.95
Empanada Intifada
A trio of fried half-moon pastries at Café Red Onion (3910 Kirby, 713-807-1122) is waging a holy war on the archaic assumption that any self-respecting pie must be served for dessert. With innovative fillings and three different sauces, the worst part about this dish ($5.95) is the agonizing decision, from…
Adis, Los Tonyos
Finally, one of the worst-kept secrets in the local restaurant world is official: Tony Vallone has sold Los Tonyos Cantina. The new restaurant, already risen from the ashes of Los Tonyos in a whirlwind four-day makeover, will be the Austin concept Serrano’s Café & Cantina. “We took over Tuesday morning,”…
Getting Off
Even in retirement, Ted liked to work. He had not had an idle day since flinging newspapers onto front lawns in middle school. His efforts eventually landed him in senior management at a Fortune 500 company. And after 40 years of marriage and sending four kids through college, he and…
All Bands on the Big Tour
It’s just a half-hour into the “Shock and Awe” campaign, and there’s nothing but ghostly green, Jerry Bruckheimer-esque war images being broadcast on television. So it’s not surprising that Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein has more on her mind than her band’s tour with Pearl Jam. “It’s just horrible,” she says…
Prevailing Perversions
All sex therapists are familiar with the Big 10 — what sex addiction researcher Patrick Carnes calls “constellations” of sexual behaviors often found together. Carnes studied more than 1,000 recovering sex addicts and their partners and calculated the percentage who had exhibited each of these behaviors: ” Seductive-role sex: Serial…
Hardy Har Mar
In the opening cut of Kill the Moonlight, the latest celebrated release by the bracing minimalist rock group Spoon, singer Britt Daniel unreels the album’s central theme by describing a life lived for “Small Stakes.” It could be about any wage slave who “feels all right from Friday night to…
Just Horny or a Hard-Core Addict?
Think you might be addicted to sex? The following questions are among those asked by Sex Addicts Anonymous to assess potential addiction: ” Do you keep secrets about your sexual or romantic activities from those important to you? Do you lead a double life? ” Have your needs driven you…
Mentally Disturbed
If metal is dead, or at least staggered by a sucking chest wound, somebody forgot to tell Dan Donegan and his Disturbed buds from Chicago. Sure, there are signs that the genre, the boundaries of which have been stretched and torn over the past 20 years like no other, is…
Vietnam 1, Alief 0
Houston Community College System Chancellor Bruce Leslie and a cohort of his administrators had barely gotten over jet lag from a recent globe-girdling flight when they were confronted with a bigger headache, a surprise 7 percent cut in state funding for HCC. Within weeks, notices went out from the five…
SMOM-my Dearest
With the hipster set being priced farther and farther north out of the Heights and Montrose (today Garden Oaks… tomorrow Acres Homes? Hempstead? Bastrop?), Sound Exchange music buyer and “chief bootknocker” David Wilcox thought it was time to look in another direction. That’s one of the reasons he’s saying, “Hi,…
Critical Condition
In early 2001, Kareem Botani was overseas spreading the gospel of the Memorial Hermann Healthcare System to medical staffs in the Persian Gulf. As the manager of Memorial Hermann’s international affairs department, Botani was marketing his employer’s reputation to foreigners seeking quality care that they couldn’t find in their home…
Less Than Jake
Ten years, six CDs and three chords after seeping out of the swamps of Gainesville, Florida, Less Than Jake is still the first band that comes to mind when you think of third-wave ska. After a two-album stint with Capitol, the band is back where it started on an indie…
Letters
Parents and Plastic Corporate innocence: I commend Jennifer Fuller for accepting at least some responsibility for her current financial predicament, but her last quote still reeks of “not my fault”-ism, and that’s irritating [“College Credit,” by Jennifer Mathieu, March 20]. It’s unfortunate she’s living in credit card hell, and I…
Will to Live CD release party, with Eyeagainst, Pride Kills, Blood Ties and Blackchild Avatar
Will to Live defines TXHC, or Texas hardcore. Once the musical assault commences at a Will to Live show, it doesn’t stop even for a second. As the lead singer explains the meaning of the next song — and it could be about anything from the ills of society to…
ZZ Tops
The name ZZ Packer sounds like the kind of pseudonym you’d find on the poetry slam circuit, and the title of her collection of short stories, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, does little to change that impression. But as it turns out, the name’s no gimmick. “My real name is Zuwena, but…
Ted Roddy and the King Conjure Orchestra
Just when you thought there couldn’t be another twist on Elvis, Ted Roddy’s fertile mind comes up with a new one: Channelin’ E, a whole CD of songs that Presley could have recorded — but didn’t. Roddy’s frequent Elvis tribute shows focus on the King’s Vegas years, and that’s the…