Break’s Over
I have this enduring image of Tracy Chapman. She’s up on-stage, alone with her guitar in front of 60,000 people at a stop on an Amnesty International tour. Headliners Peter Gabriel, Sting and Bruce Springsteen are hours away, and the natives are restless. The demure, soft-spoken Chapman is tentative, managing…
Stadia Watch
Now that County Judge Robert Eckels has his offer for a new baseball stadium on the table, the posturing over financing has begun in earnest. And the contradictions are emerging faster than the Chronicle can print them. In his knee-jerk rejection of Eckels’ plan, Astros owner Drayton McLane Jr. predictably…
Great Dwight Hope
“The hippest act in country music.” That’s Dwight Yoakam effusing over Buck Owens and the Buckaroos in the liner notes to The Buck Owens Collection. And since Buck seems to have hung up his red, white and blue guitar, the estimation might as well apply to Yoakam himself, who long…
Martini, Anyone?
Jerzy Grotowski, whose concept of “poor theater” encouraged legions of warehouse artist wannabes, once pointed out that most theater people don’t have a clear idea of what theater is other than an opportunity for actors to fling themselves about, indulging their narcissistic tendencies. Grotowski ended up in California caressing tree…
Doggone Success
It’s not always easy to determine what will become an institution, or why. Often, what seems a lock to those folks who like to think of themselves as being in the know proves to be little more than the flavor of the moment. And what those same folks dismiss as…
The Trouble with Beauty
At first glance, “Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach” appears to be so much exquisite photography for next year’s calendar. And it is, almost. In Misrach’s case, it’s that “almost” that’s so intriguing. What is it, exactly, that keeps his stunning photographs of the American desert out…
All That Jazz
At once brutally cynical and romantically nostalgic, Robert Altman’s Kansas City is a moody and bluesy pipe dream of a movie. Altman describes it as his “jazz memory,” and that sounds about right. It is not, strictly speaking, an autobiographical work. But it is a fanciful and freewheeling evocation of…
The Games Men Play
Now that Kevin Costner has gotten Wyatt Earp and Waterworld out of his system, and Ron Shelton has gotten Cobb out of his, it’s good to see both men back to doing what they do best. Tin Cup is an immensely appealing and often riotously funny romantic comedy, very much…
Sweet Jane
And the hits just keep on coming from Jane Austen, the early 19th-century novelist who’s become a late 20th-century hot property. In the past two years, we’ve seen a highly regarded film of her Persuasion, a well-received miniseries of her Pride and Prejudice and an Oscar-winning adaptation of her Sense…
The Last Safety Net
For most of her 70 years, Miss Natalie, as she’s affectionately called, lived as a semi-recluse, pursuing a life of guarded eccentricity in a modest home on the southeast edge of the Fourth Ward. But soon after the death of her domineering, overly protective mother, her eccentricities gave way to…
The Insider
24-Hour Call So who did Glenbrook Golf Course operator Art Lopez ring on his C-phone after he was involved in a car accident and arrested for DWI shortly before 1 a.m. one night last week? None other than state Senator Mario Gallegos, who responded by driving to the West Loop…
Out Heaven’s Gate
In a past life, it was just a Days Inn in a bad location on the wrong end of a changing downtown. But in 1993, the hotel was purchased for more than $2 million by followers of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and reincarnated, amid considerable fanfare, as the Heaven on…
Think Small
Not much more than a week before school starts, the five classrooms at the Raul Yzaguirre School for Success seem a long way from completion. In one classroom, pipe fitters are cutting and threading pipe for the school’s new overhead sprinkler system, littering the floor with oily metal shavings. In…
Letters
Rowe Recommended The article “Variety Club Follies” [by Tim Fleck, July 25] upset me. I have been a volunteer worker for about 50 years with the top organizations in Houston, and to me Laura Rowe was an excellent leader. She “got things done” in a nice way. You cannot sit…
Press Picks
thursday august 15 Get rich Are you rich? That’s the question posed by the members of the Borders Book Shop prosperity workshop, and “Why the heck not?” is implied in their tone. Wealth, according to workshop members, can be a state of mind, a belief system or (my personal favorite)…
Learning Curve
If the Orphans play silly and stupid better than any band in Houston, maybe it’s because they’re not acting. Newborn babes to the business of rock and roll, they’re like all infants. They crave attention, positive reinforcement, direction — coddling, if you will. What isn’t babylike, though, is the band’s…
Rotation
Schoolhouse Rock Kid Rhino Note to consumers: these are the straight-off-the-television originals of your youth. They are not covers of Schoolhouse Rock tunes performed by fashionable rock bands, though that package also is out there somewhere. Most of us (at least those of us of a certain late Gen X…
Static
Dance of the living… It’s music to soothe the most savage stage diver — mesmerizing percussion set to a luxurious, multitextured wash of keyboard samples and organic sounds from strange lands and long-ago times. The chants begin immediately, sometimes in sync with the music’s chugging rhythm, other times emerging out…