Playbill
Turntables on the Hudson In the queasy, jittery days and weeks immediately following 9/11, there was a lot of talk about the “healing power of music.” But nowhere was this medicinal value, this ability to bring about staggering feelings of catharsis, demonstrated more forcefully and more happily than at the…
The Bends
It sounds like a cruel joke to imagine a status lower than a Jew in a concentration camp. Yet that was the fate of homosexuals during Nazi Germany’s purging of “enemies” of the state. Branded with pink triangles, they were shipped to camps, separated and given horrendously menial tasks meant…
Future Shock
The future is almost here. At least, it is according to screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce (Pandaemonium) and director Michael Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People), two cinematic visionaries whose combined vision in Code 46 sparks tremendous intrigue — and unrest. At once a weirdly familiar sci-fi trip, a bleak romance, a…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, August 19 Texas seen through the eyes of an outsider can be so idyllic. Artist Andrew S. DeJesse is from the Northeast, but his oil and watercolor paintings present colorful images of the Texas landscape. His work makes its debut this week at Gallery 19 with “Visions of Tejas,”…
The Blindness of Strangers
Directed by . With .
Life Row
Sweat equity is a real-estate principle by which would-be owners of property can perform renovations in return for lower prices. When she was a girl, artist Dominique Moody’s family participated in sweat-equity plans, but little things always seemed to get in the way. Amateur laborers that they were, details of,…
Paddled Senseless
Summer movies don’t get much sillier or more empty-headed than Without a Paddle, and that includes Catwoman and King Arthur. What we have here is a low-wattage buddy flick proposing that a trio of boyhood friends, now 30 years old, can shed the last vestiges of their adolescence by traipsing…
Don’t Pass Glass
FRI 8/20 Glass surrounds us, glass encompasses us; glass keeps us safe from the elements, and glass allows those of us with weak vision to see clearly. Many spend huge chunks of their waking hours staring intently into glass screens, both for work and for pleasure. Most of us don’t…
Deck Heads
Most boys seem to tumble down the assembly line with their main switch factory-preset to Aggression. Toys are for throwing, army men are for melting, and eventually, grown males consider punching each other senseless, hurling deadly bombs or surreptitiously undermining one another to be completely reasonable forms of discourse. But…
With a Paddle
When Forrest Gump was on the All-American Ping-Pong team, he just loved playing ping-pong with his Flexolite paddle. Okay, so Forrest Gump didn’t really exist, and Flexolite manufactures pest foggers, but don’t hold that against ping-pong — or, rather, table tennis. As far as paddle games go, it’s more popular…
The Shallow End
If only love trouble were as simple as Joe DePietro and Jimmy Roberts imagine it to be in their hugely popular musical review I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change! The amusing bauble of a show now running at Stages Repertory Theatre gives us a sitcom-style world where men think…
Cool Front
SAT 8/21 For DJs, the most precious of all body parts very well may be the cochlea. That little coil embedded in the human ear is what recognizes phat beats, killer hooks and, quite possibly, the next big craze. DJ Icey ought to consider insuring his, because it helped him…
Capsule Reviews
I Do! I Do! Some musicals are charming; some, just charmed. Premiered in 1966 and written by Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones, I Do! I Do! is a flat, two-character, chamber-musical celebration of marriage that’s been a theater staple ever since its successful run in New York City. It refuses…
Family Man
THU 8/19 Stand-up comedians have long mined their families for material. Audiences know just as much about Rodney Dangerfield’s ball-breaking wife and Margaret Cho’s naive mother as they do about the performers. But Christopher Titus’s use of his kin onstage (and in his short-lived Fox sitcom, Titus) comes from a…
Trading Spaces
After several years of searching, Inman Gallery finally has a permanent home at Isabella Court, that great Spanish-style building constructed in 1929 in Midtown. That place is so wonderful, it’s a miracle somebody hasn’t bulldozed it and put up a multi-story, synthetic, stucco eyesore, which has been the fate of…
Sushi Pudding
Shaved salmon marinated with coconut lime juice, chili tapioca and Asian pear” is an appetizer on the menu at the elegant Bank Jean-Georges in the Hotel Icon on Main Street. But what is it exactly? Sushi and tapioca? Does it come in a bowl like a pudding? One of my…
Capsule Reviews
“The Big Show” Curator Michael Ray Charles’s own work makes clear why his eye was drawn to the pieces he’s selected for the Big Show. Known for paintings dealing with African-American history and identification, Charles uses the vernacular of signage to make paintings that resemble old circus and advertising posters…
The Pushers
When I ate dinner at Bank Jean-Georges with my daughter, the waiter asked if we wanted fizzy, still or “Houston” water. I asked for the Houston. Oddly the water here is served in petite stemware more appropriate in size for a glass of port. And since it was 90-something outside…
Cowboy Noir
Justin Richard has about a ton of wild, bucking bull beneath him, kicking up red dust and throwing back a head with horns like bayonets. He clutches the reins with his right hand, his left arm waving like he’s hailing a speeding cab, war-torn red-and-black boots pinned to the bull’s…
Blackbird Fly
Though these days it’s become pretty much synonymous with alt-country, and all too often bad alt-country at that, the term Americana should be reserved for people like Jolie Holland. Her first album, Catalpa, was a mere demo that wound up getting released and ended up a personal favorite of Tom…
Undercover Cop
Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt has been busy revamping the bureaucracy and fighting for a budget since his arrival in March. He claims to be proud of the department and its officers, but if he’s so damn proud how come he can’t bring himself to wear the HPD uniform? Is…
Rick James RIP, Bitch
It’s a sticky Monday night at the Proletariat three days after Rick James died, and a cavalcade of DJs — the Killers for Hire, the Cheezy Cracker Collective, the Dum Dum Boys and Eban Doss — has turned their ordinary Dynamite Lounge gig into a tribute to the last of…
Double Trouble
As Juan Diaz sat in the Immigration and Naturalization Service office earlier this month, he knew his studying had paid off on the most important exam of his life — his U.S. Citizenship Test. The examiner told him he’d passed, then offered congratulations. “And then,” Diaz says, “everything started happening…
Pop-Up Pop Stars
Are you a Houston-area female singer-dancer between the ages of 16 and 21? Do you want to be a mega-star like Beyoncé? If so, Music World/Sanctuary Urban Music Group — the international record label-management company run by Beyoncé’s father Matthew Knowles — wants you. “There’s a lot of talent in…
End of the Line
The only case to go to trial in the pollution busts at Williams Brothers Construction has been dumped out of court, fueling new arguments that environmental prosecutors here are abusing their authority. Williams Brothers, the road-building giant, had been accused of felony water pollution at two of its properties in…
Various Artists
I remember the first time I ever saw Alejandro Escovedo. I had just moved to Texas, and Al was on stage with Rank & File. He was a bad-ass-looking Latino with a pearl snap shirt, and he looked great, the perfect contrast to the surfer-boy looks of the Kinman brothers…
Letters
Tuned Up Great awards talent: I would like to send a shout-out to the Houston Press, music editor John Nova Lomax and the fine crew y’all had working the Music Awards events [“Sound Off ’04,” August 5]. The crew from Rehab was especially sharp. For one week out of the…
Various Artists
Sisters Hilary and Haylie Duff are the stars of the soundtrack for Hilary’s latest cute-a-thon, A Cinderella Story, and just as you expect, the songs they perform are enough to rot your teeth from the inside out. The first track finds the sisters Duff showing off their interchangeable vocals on…
Really Heavenly Food
How long you’ve been in Houston determines what you remember of the red brick structure on Westheimer in the heart of the Montrose. That funky eatery called Frescos? A ’70s club and head shop? Or the original St. Matthews Church? Natives and newcomers alike agree that the current resident, Mark’s…
The Slurpees
The Slurpees’s new CD, Flavors of Everyday Life, is a mixed blessing. While it features some of the best punk-rock-funk-ska instrumentals to come out of Houston recently, it’s also marred by some of the cruddiest vocals since Bill Murray last ambled through a lounge, mike in hand. The only song…