Flicked Out of Court
A former Houston Baptist University basketball player who sued the school over what he claimed were excessive hazing practices has been shut out by a Harris County jury. Matt Wohlfahrt claimed HBU players forced him to drink excessively, shaved his head against his will and engaged in other harassment during…
Ruthie Foster
If music that sounds as if it were naturally fermented from the bayous, cricks and back porches of rural America is what you seek, then look no further than Ruthie Foster’s Runaway Soul. Save a spot for this disc by the Bryan-College Station resident on the year-end list of stellar…
At QB: God
Who knew that God could read a three-deep zone? Actually, given the Supreme Being’s alleged omniscience, it would be pretty much a given that He could not only effectively detect any zone coverage tossed at him, He’d be able to read just what the free safety was imagining doing to…
The Boneshakers
After the demise of Austin’s Storyville, there was really only one question: What about Malford? Mr. Milligan, the band’s incredibly powerful vocalist, was too talented to simply plod along as a solo act with a revolving cast of players or occasionally gig with Double Trouble. Fortunately, he’s joined up with…
Don’t Rock My Boat!
When there’s a choice between doing things nasty or nice, it seems nasty generally wins out at Houston City Hall these days. Maybe things are just more fun that way for the politicos. Case in point: a developing behind-the-scenes firefight over the de facto Hispanic city seat on the Houston…
Golden, with Rye Coalition and *mytwilightpilot*
From Chicago’s edgy world-beat/ rock scene comes Golden, a semi-supergroup composed of players from Trans Am, Royal Trux and Six Finger Satellite. Guitarist/vocalist Ian Eagleson is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology, and it shows to best effect in the complex, chirping guitar lines housed inside imposing fortresses of rhythm on…
The Old West
Virgil Dugan doesn’t get around too well anymore. He walks carefully through his house, tethered by a lengthy oxygen cord that wraps around his legs when he turns and threatens to trip anyone trying to keep up with him. Breathing heavily, shaky, a little hard of hearing but resolute, the…
Simulation Number One
Andrew Niccol keeps making the same movie over and over again and dressing it in slightly different clothes: the sleek charcoal Hugo Boss grays of Gattaca, the crisp Crayola hues of The Truman Show and, now, the silk-and-satin Hollywood resplendency of Simone. Niccol, writer and director, is obsessed with a…
Johnnie and Dilbert
Johnnie and Dilbert A bona fide expert: I appreciate the interest that Wendy Grossman and the Houston Press have shown in the plight of my client Johnnie Bernal [“An Absolute Maybe,” August 8], however I am somewhat disturbed by what I believe are some misrepresentations that were made in the…
Deaf and Dope
The fascinating and heretofore unexamined theory put forth by Read My Lips (Sur mes lèvres): Being deaf offers its estimable rewards. It allows one the chance to tune out the world, to ignore everything and everyone. To the deaf, chaos can feel like soothing calm, and madness comes with its…
Versed in Life
At the point where most artists consider a career change or graduate school, Samantha Barrow opted for the university of life. “I think I found what I want to do,” she thought at the time. “I want to write and ride my bike around.” So in 2000, the 24-year-old New…
Face the Facts
Here’s a scary idea: Take photographs of the leaders of the countries with the largest nuclear stockpiles in the world and blend them into a composite portrait, weighting each photograph’s contribution to the composite by the size of his or her stockpile. In the early 1980s, the heads of state…
Social Mixer
Attend enough art events in Houston, and the faces start to look familiar. You’ll spot the same theatergoers fanning themselves with programs at performances all over town, the same art patrons carrying glasses of champagne through all the gallery openings. LiveFeed 02 is here to stir up these social cliques…
Fallon Fast
Things you will learn from a forthcoming oral history of Saturday Night Live: Dan Aykroyd slept with, among others, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman and writer Rosie Shuster, the latter of whom was, at the time, married to the show’s producer and creator, Lorne Michaels. To this day, Chevy Chase regrets…
Pro-Choice
Here’s a textbook example of what vegetarians love to complain about: I’m at my cousin’s house for a family barbecue. Through some miracle of uncharacteristic courtesy, he has bought a package of vegetarian burgers with me in mind. He serves one off the grill, points to a regulation burger still…
Pretty Enough to Eat
The Gallitos Snapper ($9.99) at Los Gallitos Restaurant (6579 West Bellfort, 713-726-9558) looks like it’s been carried through a culinary carnival. The ten-ounce slab of fish is covered in wedges of fresh tomato and medallions of sautéed jalapeño, crisscrossed with slices of red onion, speckled with bits of fresh cilantro…
A Different Shade of Blue
“Blue Jeans and Business Cards” was the name of the happy hour held a few weeks ago at the ultra-hip Seven Lounge (2002 Bagby, no. 103, 713-523-9088). And judging by this party, the 12-week-old bar-scene newcomer is fast becoming the place to see and be seen. Everything about Seven says…
Lost in Space
In the future, radio won’t be beamed from rusty old antennae. That’s so analog, so last century. The future, as we all know (so shut up already), is digital, and more and more of it’s being beamed down from space via the satellites floating above us, dangling from invisible threads,…
Kick Out the Jammies
It’s 6:45 p.m. in the neatly kept Garden Oaks home of Sugar Shack guitarist Andy Wright and his wife, drummer Stefanie Paige Friedman. Their three-month-old baby, Baxter Bob, sits on Friedman’s lap, content with a bottle. The living room TV is tuned to a later episode of The Andy Griffith…
No Mo’ Pogo
In the very same night Racket sat down with the Suspects at the Garden Oaks home of vocalist Thomas Escalante to talk about their last show ever, Press writer Bob Ruggiero was a mere two houses away, confabbing with Sugar Shack about their newfound resolve. The members of Sugar Shack…
Overdose
It’s a mid-afternoon Tuesday in the late-summer doldrums at Houston City Hall.A wheelchair-bound woman rails to City Council about the local Multiple Sclerosis Society failing to provide financial services for patients like herself. It’s a medical issue, so — to the surprise of absolutely no one on council — freshman…
Float Like a Butterfli, Swing Like a Trapeze
Ever see people so attractive they make you mad? You clench your teeth, your neck tenses up, you get migraines from the sheer frustration, the sheer futility, of trying to chat up someone so gorgeous. All you can think is “These people are just too goddamn pretty! How the hell…
Adept Ada
If Councilwoman Shelley Sekula-Gibbs is the sort of political infant terrible regularly produced by the endlessly rocking cradle of Houston term limits, colleague Ada Jean Edwards is the exception to that rule. Although term limits brought her to the fore by opening up the District D council seat, she is…
múm
The Icelandic band múm is composed of two beat-programming, synth-jockeying pinup boys and two classically trained twin girls who play everything from the glockenspiel to the viola. As evidenced by that other “it” band from Iceland, Sigur Rós, not to mention Björk, there’s got to be something in the water…
Hard on the Yard
Just northwest of Heights Boulevard and Memorial Drive is a three-story building with a name that echoes irony: Scotland Yard. Unlike its London namesake, the headquarters of Brits busting criminals, this Scotland Yard houses the offices of some 20 attorneys in the business of representing clients, many charged with crimes…
John Mayer
If the aw-shucks golden-boy image and seemingly idealistic folk-pop were where it ended, he’d be as easy to ignore as Hootie for mediocrity alone. But John Mayer’s massive hit album Room for Squares bears the unmistakable scent of something sinister. For one thing, the 23-year-old singer-songwriter is smarmier than Ja…