Time Lines
The good news came by mail: CONGRATULATIONS JOHN CARROLL! The letter went on to breathlessly assure that I was a “major prize-winner” in the 1998 Polaris Giveaway. Maybe I’d won a new truck, or $25,000, or a major vacation package or $500 cash. All I had to do to claim…
Deporting Disparities
At a Spring Branch taqueria, the television screen is tuned to a soccer match — and the mostly male, Latino patrons are closely following the action. Weak air conditioning, lazily spinning ceiling fans and the tension make it seem much hotter in the room. Brazil finally scores a goal against…
Letters
Space Not Wasted Thanks for your thorough and illuminating story on the proposed dump [“Trench Warfare,” by Shaila Dewan and Stuart Eskenazi, July 23]. I appreciate the space you gave to get out the full story. A fine piece of work. Fran Sage via Internet Atomic Monkey Business Great article…
Night & Day
Thursday August 6 Jake Johannsen’s shtick, starting out, was the nerdy guy hesitantly stammering his way through long takes on life’s little mysteries. He’s canned much of the nerdiness, but he’s still one of the funniest standups around. Filled with more neuroses and idiosyncrasies than would seem possible in an…
Cozy Church of Cinema
It’s not — entirely — the redundant, simplistic and insanely loud films themselves that make going to the movies such a mind-numbing experience; it’s also the theaters, with their cramped seats, terrifying floors, over-amped, unbalanced sound — a place where the movie light and artificial darkness are a merciful kind…
Celebrate the Celts
In Texas, we have festivals that honor everything imaginable, from mosquitoes and hot sauce to Bob Marley. And if we’re honest, we know it’s basically an excuse to party, drink beer and escape summer reruns. But back in the day (oooold days, that is), festivals took on a much more…
Legacy of Leigh
She is forever etched into pop-culture iconography as the vain but gritty Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. She is almost as well known for her Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire — an aging, hallucinatory Southern belle who could easily have passed for Scarlett’s direct descendent. But…
Dish
A Walk Through Chinatown For many, “dim sum” might be a term to accurately reflect the balance in their checking accounts. But to aficionados of Chinese food, it’s a tasty Cantonese specialty. And if your exposure to foods of the Orient is usually limited to the sweet-and-sour pork with egg…
A Different Kind of Steak House
I don’t normally like steak houses. The spectacle of men, most of whom don’t know a good steak from a bad one, happily forking out $30 for a T-bone that may or may not be mediocre is one I find profoundly depressing. Chimi-Churris South American Grill, though, is different. Owned…
Shakespeare with a Twist
Every flaming hot summer for close to a quarter of a century, the University of Houston has been bringing Shakespeare to the public. It’s a fine gift. The shows are absolutely free. And though the plays are performed outdoors, these August nights are balmy. The temperature lingers at 80 degrees…
Hot Plate
Mortadella may be new to you. It was to me. A lightly smoked Italian sausage — usually ham, though there are pork and beef versions as well — it’s studded with pistachios and seasoned with parsley, basil and cilantro. (Traditionalists add myrtle — mortella, in Italian — which explains the…
Raw and Wonderful
Outsider art — held up as a model of raw expression, passionate integrity, uncurbed innovation and psychic intensity — is enjoying a high profile these days. Loosely covering schizophrenics, compulsive “mediums” and untutored artists, it is now a legitimate category that includes curators, scholars and collectors; books and magazines; exhibitions;…
Symphony of Setbacks
Let’s start with the old news: The Verve broke up for more than a year and then re-formed, only to have the songwriting royalties from their biggest American hit, “Bittersweet Symphony,” go to Keith Richards and Mick Jagger because of an errant sample. Nike used the song in a commercial,…
Snakes Alive
Nicolas Cage has never seemed more dazzling than he does in the new Brian De Palma thriller Snake Eyes. Playing Rick Santoro, a corrupt Atlantic City cop who likes to think he’s “everybody’s friend,” Cage for almost two continuous hours is boogying to his own inner beat. It’s like watching…
Static
Keeping it loose at KTRU… When it was announced earlier this year that Rice University’s KTRU/91.7 FM would be hiring its first-ever professional staff member to oversee operations at the station, many listeners braced themselves for the worst. After all, KTRU is a station championed by many for its eclectic,…
Hour Gang
It’s a truism that unless your film picks up momentum as it goes along, you’d do well not to put a ticking clock in it. Thrillers like The Big Clock and DOA work because they’re superior mousetraps that have found a way to put time itself in pursuit of the…
World of Their Own
Perhaps the best way to begin a story about the Squirrel Nut Zippers is to clear up what they aren’t. They do not belong to the so-called neo-swing movement that consists of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and other like-styled rockers-turned-zoot-suit-rioters. Neither do they fall into the Vegas show band, cocktail…
Dark Red Star
Your first reward for seeing The Thief will be to learn a word of Russian. During the title credits, the word BOP almost covers the screen, but the film doesn’t tell the story of Moscow’s underground jazz scene. In Russian, a thief is a bop (pronounced more or less “vore,”…
Clubland
Apparently, there is such a thing as too upscale, even in the Galleria area. “It was just too snotty,” says Lisa Calvin-Senejas, marketing director for the new Max’s 2001 nightclub. “You can’t expect people to wear jackets and ties in this weather.” It’s rumored that it was just those ultra-stiff…
Mama Ninfa and her Comeback Kids
Once upon a time in Houston, a humble and proud Hispanic family earned fame and fortune on the backs of well-grilled beef strips wrapped in a lardy flour tortilla with a side of avocado sauce. And though this history omits a good many contributing factors — hard work, determination, family…
Rotation
Liz Phair whitechocolatespaceegg Matador/Capitol Some might complain that marriage and motherhood have blunted Liz Phair’s edge. Where she was once content to rant from her own, often bluntly personal vantage point, Phair tackles, on whitechocolatespaceegg, a broader range of characters and textures. Her first release, 1993’s Exile in Guyville, was…
Going the Distance
The roads to Olympic glory — or at least the roads to the opportunity to host Olympic glory — are many and varied. In Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, for instance, the cities’ mayors got together earlier this summer to announce a joint bid to be the site of the Summer…
Old Friends
Grover Washington Jr. has a special bond with Houston; specifically, with Houston’s big-band leader Conrad Johnson. During the ’70s, when Washington would come to Houston, the saxophonist who originally wanted to be a teacher until “the music got in the way” would spend his days at Kashmere and Sam Houston…