Rotation
Dive Exhibit A Pulse Productions Sometimes it seems like Houston’s been waiting for a national break-out band ever since ZZ Top — you know, just to show the world that we can. Exhibit A, as good a debut as it is, probably won’t be the album to take Dive to…
Critic’s Choice
Standard Time By spearheading the neoconservative jazz movement of the early ’80s, Wynton Marsalis proved himself the strongest inheritor of a bop and swing tradition that had been drowning in a sea of fusion for a decade. Marsalis’ brash, dogmatic pronouncements that jazz — jazz from before the ’70s, anyway…
Walk on the Wilde Side
In the months before August 1967, when his lover bludgeoned him to death with a hammer, Joe Orton had finally begun to make some theatrical waves. A failure at high school and then as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he wrote with little success for a…
It’s Not Easy Being Gray
The last time Spalding Gray was in town, two years ago, he talked to the Press about his fears that he would one day die in Houston. “That whole karma thing” is how he recalled that notion during a recent phone interview in anticipation of his April 15 return, on…
Magic for the Masses
In simple terms, Penn & Teller are the bad boys of modern magic — that, or two of the few genuine artists working in contemporary American theater. Their irreverent showmanship — they do ooky effects with childlike glee and sometimes even explain how a magic trick or illusion works –…
Memory Down the Hole
At the moment, the only hostages in the Middle East are the people who live there. Crimes, like clothes, go in and out of fashion, and apparently it’s no longer de rigueur to kidnap a few wandering Westerners in the hopes of headlines and perhaps a deal for a shipment…
Falling Stars
There was a time when the Taviani brothers, Paolo and Vittorio, were regarded as standard-bearers for Italian film. Their 1981 movie The Night of the Shooting Stars demonstrated a wide range of cinematic and narrative virtues. A wheat-field fight between Mussolini sympathizers and fleeing villagers contained images that continue to…
Hollywood Lives, Hollywood Lies
Barry Levinson’s 1992 fantasy Toys was an interesting flop. Who would have thought that the man who directed Bugsy, The Natural and Rain Man; who wrote …And Justice For All; who wrote and directed the acclaimed Baltimore trinity, Diner, Tin Men and Avalon, would lose his objectivity in what he…
Following the Money
John Bockris may have been foolish to allow a con man into his laboratory to investigate a modern form of alchemy, but he wasn’t the only one to make a mistake in regard to Joe Champion. The administration at Texas A&M University showed judgment nearly as bad as that of…
Post Office Push-ups
Early in February, 200 irate parents gathered at a meeting of the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District’s school board to complain about what was being done with sports in their schools. This being Texas, one might have expected the exercised mothers and fathers to be upset over a losing football season,…
Aggie Alchemy
Texas A&M Code of Honor “Ye who makes thy own gold, makes thy own rules.” New Golden Rule On a mid-October morning in 1992, three Americans, all connected in one way or another with Texas A&M University, stood up in front of a gathering of press people at the El…
Letters
Not Painful Enough I have just read Steve McVicker’s “Crime & Punishment” article [March 24]. I am in full support of Anthony Ray Westley’s receiving the death penalty. I’m just sad that his accomplice, John Dale Henry, didn’t receive the same. I am sick and tired of the court system’s…
Press Picks
thursday april 7 African-American Studies Symposium Not a recent arrival on the multicultural bandwagon, the University of Houston African-American Studies Program was launched in the late sixties. Today’s symposium will look at the program and its role in the community and in the UH curriculum. The symposium, “Working Together to…
Room with a Voodoo
Our reservations were for 7:30. But Anthony’s dramatic new Highland Village location was packed to the gills that Thursday night; would we mind waiting in the bar? Thirty minutes passed. We surveyed the prosperous crowd for boldface types, wondering whether Warren and Felicia and David and Suzanne would show. We…
Seoul Food
It is a little-known fact that Korean cuisine boasts dumpling soups so doughty they make your basic Chinese wonton soups look positively anemic. For those adventurers who do not flinch from seriously unassimilated ethnic eateries, a fine example can be had at a southwest spot called Myung Dong. Actually it’s…
Jazzing the Grass Banjo
Virtually guaranteed a high standing in the “Instrument, Miscellaneous” category of Down Beat’s annual polls, jazz banjo player Bela Fleck brings an eclectic mixture of folk, bluegrass, funk, country and rock influences to his music. His Nashville-based band, the Flecktones, performs over 200 dates a year (leading to the recent…
Mixed Messages
Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but if you’ve yet to take a look at the charts page in the back of the April 21 Rolling Stone, you might want to check it out just for the shock value. There, in the “Alternative Music” countdown dominated by Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked…