Rotation
Squirrel Nut Zippers The Inevitable Squirrel Nut Zippers Mammoth Nostalgia is the opium of popular culture partially because it’s artistically lazy, but more importantly because it’s too familiar to stir much enthusiasm. A little fun, though, can go a long way toward making regurgitations of old music palatable, even exciting…
Sounding Out Mary
Over the phone from Miami, you can almost hear Mary Karlzen wince as it’s suggested that she fits into a trend — waifish female singers with a mouth-of-the-South voice who delve into personal experience from a woman’s perspective. Though she brightens a little when the suggestion is fleshed out with…
Touring Songs
In 1993, Simon Bonney, the former frontman of Australia’s Crime and the City Solution, took a road trip across America. Joined by his pregnant wife and musical collaborator Bronwyn Adams and their baby daughter, Bonney drove from his newly adopted home in Los Angeles to New York to play a…
Down on Peckerwood Hill
At times it must seem that way, but not every convict released from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice comes to Houston. Some take up residence at a place formally known within the TDCJ as Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery but better known in Huntsville as “Peckerwood Hill” — the final…
Diner’s Notebook
Among the Tangleweenies Ethnic chills and cutting-edge thrills are all well and good, but sometimes the soul craves the bourgeois comforts of old-fashioned substance. I have in mind the clubby kind of place where prosperous burghers dine on food that neither excites nor alarms, but quietly pleases; where table-hopping and…
A Sound of Hovering Wings
Throughout Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches — the first part of a seven-hour drama of love, sex, politics and the spirit — the most consistent story line comes through a series of progressively majestic pronouncements of the approach of a mysterious angel, whose eventual arrival marks the end…
Live TV
“Don’t go telling your mother about this; she doesn’t understand business.” “My family means more to me than all the money in the world.” “We were rich before we hit the Lotto; we just didn’t know it.” As that dialogue shows, Cliff Roquemore’s Lotto: Experience the Dream comes straight from…
Lover Men
Nick Nolte’s craggily handsome face, steely eyes and whiskey-and-cigarettes voice are the epitome of ravaged old-movie grandeur. But in his heart, he’s always been a character actor, not an icon. Although resourceful directors have managed to use him that way — notably Walter Hill in 48 HRS. and Extreme Prejudice…
Into the Tank
Based on the cult-fave comic series by Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett, Tank Girl is more a psychedelic fusion of comic and film than a movie version of the comic. Using wild animation that’s much in the vein of MTV’s Liquid Television along with comic panels drawn by Tank Girl…
The Wendy Card
Phil Gramm, the senior senator from Texas, is known as a deft opportunist, a man who instinctively sniffs out television cameras and fashions headlines out of molehills. So no less than perfect choreography — all the ruffles and flourishes, including the requisite saber-crossing Aggies — was expected when Gramm returned…
Festi-Brawl
From the windows of his paper-strewn second floor office, businessman John Flores can see where, traditionally, Westheimer’s biannual street festival has begun. Through the glass, he could watch crowds coursing up and down the sidewalk, stopping at crafts booths, buying some food, buying a beer and adding a considerable amount…
Last Strike?
According to the March 3 edition of Space News Roundup, the official house organ of the Johnson Space Center, all of the cases arising from the FBI’s Operation Lightning Strike “are closed, or are being closed, with no unresolved issues.” Not if Dale Brown has his way. Brown will go…
Letters
Religious Rapacity What a combination! A homo-hating and AIDS-fearing neighborhood coupled with a greedy preacher who will go to any length, including exploiting AIDS victims, to snatch up federal tax dollars [“The Battle over Brentwood,” by Claudia Kolker, March 16]. While some in the gay and lesbian community have lauded…
Press Picks
thursday april 6 Peter Pan Take your little boys and girls to see the musical about a boy (often played by a girl) who never wants to grow up. HITS Unicorn Theatre, which has since 1987 brought such productions as Anything Goes, Annie and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella to the…
One Perfect Meal
Restaurants are mysteriously unpredictable organisms. Take Tien Fu, an unusually pretty neighborhood Chinese place on West Alabama, between Shepherd and Kirby. Roll the dice once and you may come away convinced you’ve discovered a great, inexpensive staple to add to your Chinese restaurant rotation. Roll the dice a few days…
Blues Survivor
The history of the blues is a book filled with unhappy endings. But according to veteran blues songwriter Nick Gravenites, successful, respected and reasonably prosperous at an age when many bluesmen fear what tomorrow might bring, the story has a happy ending — as long, that is, as the story…