The Celtic Connection
Orange, particulate-laden light slants down Norfolk Street as a sweltering Houston day becomes sweltering Houston dusk. Inside McGonigel’s Mucky Duck, despite a packed house early on a weekday evening, there’s a feeling of being somewhere cooler, somewhere north of Texas and halfway around the world. On the stage in the…
Critic’s Choice
Nobody ever accused the Catherine Wheel of being about fun. After all, it’s hard to misread the intentions of an English quartet that chooses to name itself after a gruesomely inventive tool used for torture in the fourth century. Given that, you can take any optimism hinted at in the…
Rotation
Bjsrk Post Elektra The eccentric voice of Bjsrk, with its range and variety of accents and enunciations, could make a reading of the dictionary a pleasurable experience. Her songs have always been more about sound than meaning; the only person who could probably make any sense out of the majority…
Diner’s Notebook
Sometimes it seems as if there’s a Texas-genre food place on every other corner. You know: fajitas, burgers, steaks, fried things, mesquite-grilled things, Mexicanized things. Often, there is a dreadful sameness to these establishments. So it’s refreshing to stumble across one that does a pretty good job on the standards…
Letters
Ignoring Ezra Hats off to your music editor and the entire nominating committee for the Houston Press Music Awards for finally elevating me and my band to the ranks of the other established Houston-based artists (ZZ Top, Lyle Lovett, Clint Black, etc.) by not including us in any of the…
Island Rumbles
Galveston Island Outdoor Musicals’ production of West Side Story is as contradictory as the (in)famous teenagers themselves. Moody, mercurial and inconsistent, the show commands attention as much for what it does poorly as for what it does well. Just at the point when it’s flying high, it plummets; right when…
Back to the Future
The trouble with so many movies about tomorrow is that they seem so much like yesterday’s news. Take Virtuosity, the latest in the current rash of science fiction films about the dark side of high tech. The plot relies heavily on a premise (amoral technocrats take over a privatized law-enforcement…
Hot Topics
Dangerous Minds and Jeffrey come shining onto the big screen secure of a certain success based on their high-minded and topical subject matter. Both of these issue-oriented movies take off from an earnest, PC starting point: Dangerous Minds is the latest in a long and shaky line of one-noble-teacher-making-a-difference-in-the-inner-city movies…
Houston’s Housing
Two years ago, on a fine summer day, Mayor Bob Lanier herded President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore out Interstate 10 to the Winwood Club Apartments, off Dairy Ashford Road on Houston’s western edge. The mayor was taking the visiting dignitaries there both to score a few political…
Baby Boom
Ever since the United States began edging toward normalizing relations with Vietnam, U.S. businesses have itched to work on deals there. By the time embassies were green lighted this July, executives from companies as diverse as Mobil Oil, Baker Performance Company and Anderson International had already lined up for their…
The Insider
Ghosts in the Machine Ah, the dangers of the computerized newsroom. Last Wednesday, a Houston Chronicle copy editor allowed the paper’s new Whirlwind computer program to fly on automatic pilot through a spell check of a story on Netscape Communications Corporation, with some interesting results. Whirlwind decided Microsoft Corporation needed…
Press Picks
thursday august17 Bach to Broadway Yum-Yum and Tevye meet at the South Main Baptist Church dessert theater this weekend. The church’s musical tradition continues with a two-part program of light opera and show tunes. The Mikado, a Gilbert and Sullivan favorite, opens the show. After the adventures of Yum-Yum and…
Family Feast
What a dinner party it would be. In my mind’s eye, I can see them bellied up to the red-checked linens at Mandola’s Family Table: George Foreman; Tom Arnold and Roseanne, together again; Rush Limbaugh; Chris Farley; Shaquille O’Neal. Stalwart eaters who would not flinch from the monumental logs of…
Short and Punky
Sad Pygmy bassist/vocalist Carol Sandin and guitarist/vocalist C-Dog are married — not just to each other, but also to their stubborn conception of the independence and integrity of punk rock. You can hear it in their music, which is a staunchly anti-fashionable mind meld of Clash-inspired first generation punk rock…
Mr. Bad Example
Warren Zevon’s characters are mad, desperate, frightening, pathetic sorts. They are sociopaths who smear pot roasts on their chests and rape and kill their prom dates only to build cages with their bones; down-on-their-luck outlaws who need lawyers, guns and money; junkies stranded on the outskirts of town; paranoids who…