An Absolute Maybe
Lee Dilley spent an hour shooting pool and drinking beer at a Berry Road icehouse with a couple of guys he’d known since kindergarten. It was a mid-August Friday evening the summer after Dilley’s freshman year at Stephen F. Austin University, and they were hanging out at Nick’s Drive Inn…
How Do You Take It?
There’s an awful lot of cellophane wrapped around the banana nut muffin I just bought at the Bright & Early Coffee drive-through stand at the corner of Washington and Durham. I flip the package over on the passenger seat and search for a seam with my right hand while sipping…
Down the Hall
By all indications, Baylor College of Medicine and Annette McManus had been great for each other. McManus found a job as a receptionist there soon after graduating from Clear Creek High School in 1987. And she had worked her way up through the ranks of Baylor since then. By the…
Banjo Blues
Since 1995, when his 15 years at The Houston Post ended with that paper’s demise, Steve Olafson has been the Houston Chronicle’s man in Brazoria County. For a little more than a year, he has also been Banjo Jones, the nom de plume of the guy who published the Brazosport…
Bayou City Bulldozers
Bayou City Bulldozers Keep the heritage: I read the article [“This Old House,” by Jennifer Mathieu, July 25] with sadness but no surprise. Houston is one of the worst big cities as far as preservation is concerned. I am a native Houstonian, and I live in the house my grandfather…
She Will Survive
The year 1984 was bad for Alice Sebold. She was 21 years old, and had just arrived in the Bayou City to pursue a graduate degree in creative writing at the University of Houston. The weather was nasty. As she stood on the front lawn of her first college party…
Flirting with Disaster
Chicken-shack waitress. Single mom. Playboy centerfold. Heiress. Walking coma. These are just a few of the terms people have used to describe the enigma that is Anna Nicole Smith. Once a curvy throwback to the days of Monroe, Mansfield and Ekberg, she’s now a bloated, slurred, frighteningly gaudy emblem of…
Sounds Fishy
They belong in a Caesar salad, on top of a traditional pizza, in bagna cauda (the delicious hot vegetable dip) or in a puttanesca pasta sauce. They are anchovies, those pungent, salty little fish that people love to hate. At Aldo’s (219 Westheimer, 713-523-2536), they’re transformed into an obscure Italian…
A Toast to Julia and Paul
In the latest issue of Gourmet magazine, I read that Julia Child’s late husband, Paul, enjoyed concocting cocktails almost as much as his wife loves to cook. So I ambled over to Muldoon’s (3200 Kirby Drive, 713-526-5595) to sample a drink that Paul invented in Paris more than 50 years…
Baby, You’re a Star
Talking to Simpleton’s downtown headquarters from the Press’s offices can be scary. At the nearby bus station, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice drops off a Greyhound full of embittered and aimless parolees every day. Many of them are said to dwell under the Pierce Elevated, far from the watchful…
Aden
The congenitally collegiate Brooklyn-based indie-pop outfit Aden named its last two albums, Black Cow and Hey 19, after Steely Dan songs. While the idiosyncrasies the band buries within the fussy clean-channel noodling on its new Topsiders probably wouldn’t attract the attention of Messrs. Fagen and Becker — can you imagine…
Tyrannosaurus Raps
The Smokin’ Grooves Tour is only a few days old, but Nu-Mark, one of the DJ/producers behind the L.A.-based hip-hop ensemble Jurassic 5, makes one thing certain: He couldn’t be happier. He has hung and talked shop with most of the other acts on the bill: OutKast, Cee-Lo, the Roots…
Hayes Carll
Not since fellow Old Quarter alum Diane Craig’s Fortunes Told has a member of the OQ fraternity released as impressive a record as Flowers and Liquor, Hayes Carll’s ode to the thought-probing properties of alcohol. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Carll’s songs have been fleshed out by producer Lisa Morales,…
Banjos on the Bayou
As a movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou? was a moderately successful retelling of Ulysses set in the depression-era Deep South filtered through the warped minds of the Coen brothers. What drove the story was the period music, an eclectic mix of bluegrass, traditional country, blues, field hollers, old-time and…
Tommy Lee
You have to hand it to that Tommy Lee. He knows exactly who pays the freight (namely, teenage boys with perpetual boners), and he has no problem with that legacy. For his tenure with Mötley Crüe, Lee is remembered less as a talented drummer (which he is) than the one…
¡Viva Compadre!
Just under a year ago, Racket predicted a rosy future for Brad Turcotte’s local label Compadre Records, and like blind pigs, even lowly music scribes sometimes sniff out acorns. So far Turcotte has made Racket look like the genius he thinks he is after his third shot of Herradura. Turcotte’s…
Heart to Heart
Clint Eastwood’s 23rd film as director, Blood Work, is another crime thriller in the mode of, but better than, True Crime (1998) and Absolute Power (1996), two of his last three films. More than these, however, it resembles In the Line of Fire (1993), the Eastwood vehicle directed by Wolfgang…
Cock-a-Doodle Deux
Francis Page Jr. is one elusive sum-bitch — we’re talking panda bears on the Discovery Channel elusive. During the day, it’s an exhausting search trying to locate the man. He’s always out and about, trying to make his workload, which has grown immensely over the past few months, a little…
Island of Bad Sequels
Nothing’s more disappointing than the sequel that feels forced rather than organic. It was inevitable that Spy Kids, so good that Miramax’s Dimension division released it twice last year (once, in a special “long form” version containing a handful of added scenes), would spawn a sibling. That movie, as neon-bright…
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Six years ago John Frusciante was missing in action — not so much missing, actually, as lost, holed up in the Château Marmont on Sunset Boulevard with a guitar in one hand and a syringe in the other (actually, a syringe in the arm, leg, wherever he could tap a…
Thunderbald
In case you didn’t happen to read the tagline on the ubiquitous poster, Xander Cage, also known as xXx because he’s tattooed his first initial three times on the back of his neck, is “a new breed of secret agent.” The old breed, we learn pretty quickly, is Bond, James…
Do the Math
A press pass, reporter-turned-novelist Gregory McDonald once said, is good for one thing: It allows the journalist to ask very smart people very stupid questions. Certainly, that’s how it feels after this 45-minute drive from downtown Dallas to the Allen home of Stan Liebowitz, professor of economics at the University…
She Knows Where She’s Going
The title on the announcement card for Sigrid Sandstrom’s exhibit at Inman Gallery reads, “I Know Where I’m Going!” Must be nice to be possessed of such certainty, to assume you have such control over your life. Bloody cheeky, really. Typical artistic arrogance. Who does she think she is anyway…
A Dreamy Midsummer Night
The wicked city of Sodom’s got nothing on Venice, where big-breasted, red-lipped women stand on every street corner dressed in nothing but black garters, silk stockings and curve-hugging skivvies that look like undergarments from a futuristic brothel. At least that’s the way director Rutherford Cravens sees the place in his…