Loop de Loop 610
The best ride of the day was not on a roller coaster but in a stretch limousine; it purred there on pitted asphalt, gleaming like polished bone in the Gulf Coast sun. The Six Flags flacks had hand-picked half a dozen limo riders from the gathered throng of media types;…
Canning Tuna
Climactic things happen at the end of trilogies, whether it’s Michael Corleone chomping his last cannoli or Luke Skywalker finding out the girl of his dreams is really his sister. Similar earth-shattering revelations are surely in store for the residents of mythical Tuna, Texas (where “the Lions Club is too…
Hot Plate
Do you find it hard to concentrate in Trulucks (5919 Westheimer, 783-7270)? I do. The place suggests an art nouveau railway carriage and makes me think that it’s 1920, and I’m traveling through the Balkans on the Orient Express. That woman at the next table: a spy, surely. And the…
Semper Fidelis
How do I know if I’ve enjoyed a restaurant? Very often, my notes tell the story. Here’s a breakdown. Clean notes: awful. Sloppy punctuation: so-so. A careless scrawl: moderately good. A careless scrawl in combination with food stains: worth a second visit. I must have had an awfully good time…
Reason to Roam
If he’d had his druthers, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott would’ve probably been born in Texas. Instead, he entered the world in Brooklyn, New York, a happy stroke of fate that eventually led to his becoming one of the primary enduring human threads of the contemporary American folk oeuvre. A friend and…
Travels with Mikey
If nothing else, the current edition of Michael Moore’s continuing self-love fest does have a great subject: the desperation hidden inside a “thriving” U.S. economy. While politicians and financial wizards point to unemployment on the wane and profits on the rise, Moore notes that the largest employer in the country…
Ball of Confusion
In 1997, the Artist Formerly Known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince and Currently Known as Sir Hieroglyph was lying low. It’s all relative, sure, but ’97 was the first year since 1983 that hadn’t seen a single disc released by the Funky Pop Polymath. There were reasons, of…
In All Immodesty …
The Houston Press did well for itself in the Press Club of Houston’s most recent round of awards. Those awards recognize excellence in journalism published in 1997; and the Press competes in the “newspapers over 100,000” division, where its chief rival is the Houston Chronicle. The Press’s Randall Patterson won…
Rotation
The Mavericks Trampoline MCA Mavericks lead singer/songwriter Raul Malo has always harbored ambition as soaring as his gorgeous voice. But for him and his band, the focus of those ambitions is constantly shifting. On their major-label debut, 1990’s From Hell to Paradise, Malo possessed the unfettered ambition to write Bakersfield…
Mean Streets
Rapper Ice Cube’s debut as a director/ screenwriter is a big step backward in terms of the representation of African-Americans and women in film. The Player’s Club features a group of up-and-coming black male actors who portray hardly anything other than rogue hustlers, abusive hip-hoppers and capricious rapists. The film’s…
Static
Quality time… “It was absolutely fantastic,” gushes Texas Johnny Brown, one of the more immovable veterans dotting the Houston blues landscape. It seems the 70-year-old singer/ guitarist is still giddy over the March 27 celebration thrown in honor of his new Nothin’ but the Truth CD. By all accounts, the…
Do the Time Warp
Danger, Will Robinson! Sensors detect boomer-TV redux once again. This time the victim is Lost in Space, Irwin Allen’s enjoyably absurd sci-fi TV fantasy, which ran from 1965 to 1968 on CBS, before ABC’s Batman trounced it in the ratings. Grownups are likely to cringe at the prospect of sitting…
Dish
A Beignet by Any Other Name Coffee Call has a new name. Starting immediately, both its locations (the original in the Lamar River Oaks Center at 3260 Westheimer, 520-8291; and the other at 1818 Fountainview, 334-4414) will be known as Crescent City Beignets. The old name struck me, and others…
Mash and Trash
If American movie moguls really thought like Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, they’d probably spend more time blowing up Federal Reserve banks than calculating the first-weekend grosses. As it is, instead of buying inflammable fertilizer and fuel oil, the moguls are selling it — in the form of action movies…
Taking the Waves
“What am I trying to say here?” said Gene Gore, as he stuffed in another French fry at the Purple Cow restaurant. “What is the deeper thought of longboarding?” To begin, there are two very distinct kinds of surfers. There are longboarders, and there are shortboarders, and they are as…
Rocket Men
The way Harry Dace figures it, NASA engineer Jim Akkerman is the best mechanic in the world. For Dace’s sake — and for the sake of Dace’s fledgling Civilian Astronaut Corps — Akkerman had better be. Next year, on the Fourth of July, Dace and Akkerman hope to blast six…
The Hotel Six Joker Turns Wild
Veteran Houston criminal defense attorney Kent Schaffer dropped by the Hotel Six proceedings last month to catch some of the early action, and wandered out into the hallway during a break. In his path stood Julio Molineiro, the FBI’s bespectacled, wisecracking undercover informant and the prosecution’s upcoming star witness in…
Horror Show
The past year has been a horror movie for former state district judge Ruben Guerrero. Call it Revenge of the Rich White Males. It stars conniving lawyers and congressmen, a busybody senator and a whole host of hurt feelings, accusations and calls to arms. While it may be a horror…
Letters
Anderson Elementary After reading Richard Connelly’s article “Peer Pressure” [March 26], I am much more grateful for my daughter’s good fortune to be attending The Rice School/La Escuela Rice (the subject of Tim Fleck’s article in August of last year). Whatever shortcomings may have been due to less than stellar…
Night & Day
Thursday April 9 Texas Monthly has always been a good read, but, image being everything in this postliterate age, the style honchos at TM have never skimped on art. Many of the top lens artists within these borders (and without) have contributed to the magazine over the last quarter-century –…