I, Whitmire
At a time when most Houston Democrats are moping about with hangdog looks, an upbeat and preening John Whitmire is putting his favorite personal pronoun forward to potential contributors in a letter inviting them to a December 6 fundraiser. In case the state senator didn’t send you one, here’s a…
Friends and Fantasy
Peter Jackson might be the boldest English-language director working today — or at least the boldest whose films are seen by almost no one. His latest effort, Heavenly Creatures, should remedy that situation. Based on a real-life New Zealand murder case in which two adolescent girls plotted the murder of…
Letters
Bad Billy The letter by Mavis P. Kelsey Jr. worshipping Billy Burge and his unselfish work to make his perfect bus system [Letters, November 10] is a direct insult to bus riders in Houston. As a daily bus rider, my experience is that most of Metro’s patrons only experience uneven…
Press Picks
thursday december 1 A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story of Christmas This now ubiquitous holiday story was, when it apeared in 1843, the invention of Christmas as we know it. Before this veritable blueprint for Christmas celebrations sprang from Charles Dickens’ pen, people simply took a little extra care when…
Pub Grub? No Flub
It is gratifying to report that in the battle of the brewpubs now raging along Richmond Avenue’s party strip, the home-team entry shows signs of being a winner. The Houston Brewery may not possess the deep corporate pockets of the Rock Bottom Brewery — its sprawling, Denver-based, publicly traded rival…
Doin’ the Blood Thing
The word “extreme” has become a press release staple in the past couple of years, as more and more bands try to push more and more envelopes of taste and musical stricture in the quest to latch onto something new, or at least something interesting enough to sell a few…
Live Shots
The Wolfe Tones Monday, November 21 Stevens of Hollywood Dance Studio The Wolfe Tones, named for an 18th-century Irish nationalist, have spent the last three decades singing of their dream of a unified Ireland — and of the national sport of that beautiful land, which is killing your neighbors over…
Growed-up Stuff
The grownups are coming, the grownups are coming. For those members of our reading audience who aren’t all atitter over the metaphoric bloodletting offered by the Unsane and Biohazard bill at Numbers, there remain a host of fine in-town showcases featuring mature, adult sounds to which you may eagerly totter…
Snowboarding in L.A.
Adventures in LaLa Land… Those big-guitar-soundin’, herb-worshippin’, one-lovin’ hip-rockers in Planet Shock! are back from their latest field trip to Los Angeles, and if they still haven’t signed on anybody’s dotted line, that’s not to say they didn’t return encouraged (though their manager will tell you there’s no rush, the…
An American Doll’s House
“But you see, I can’t do any other work,” observes Lulu Bett, a well-bred spinster confined to domesticity in small-town America, circa 1920. “That’s the trouble. Women like me can’t do any other work.” The trouble a theater company faces when staging Miss Lulu Bett — Zona Gale’s acerbic, 1920…
Losing Focus?
Any way you slice it, FotoFest 1994 — the biennial international photography event that filled the George R. Brown Convention Center from mid- to late November and is touted as one of the largest such festivals in the world — was surprisingly tame. Immediately upon entering the convention center, one…
Woman Trouble
You might not have noticed it, but in the last six months, the leading ranks of American film directors has grown by one. John Dahl is the most exciting, stylish, entertainingly smart director to come along in years. Working within film noir — but making it totally new — he…
Oh, Baby
Perhaps grasping for a little of the magic he found when directing Ghostbusters, Ivan Reitman begins his Junior in the same way as his breakthrough film — in a library with long spooky shots down deserted library aisles. But no specters appear. Instead, we’re introduced to Dr. Alex Hesse (Arnold…
The Trial of Joe Russo
There were times during the bank fraud trial of Joe Russo when courtroom observers might have had trouble recognizing the man who, in the boom that fueled the giddy 1970s and early ’80s, came to symbolize everything that was brash and energetic about Houston. In the middle of the last…
Cyberdreams
One hot day during the summer of 1992, David Rains wondered exactly what the hell he was doing driving back and forth every weekend from his home in Corpus Christi to the set of a low-budget science fiction film being shot in Houston, especially considering how he was dressed. Rains…
A Slight Omission
You may have missed it, but a small wire story buried in the November 12 edition of the Houston Chronicle reported that the Chicago Tribune had sent a “handful” of employees to fill in for striking reporters and production workers at the San Francisco Chronicle, and that other newspapers had…
Hard Habit to Break
M.D. Anderson Cancer Center banned the sale of cigarettes back in the mid-1970s, becoming one of the first hospitals in the country to do so. The University of Texas-affiliated institution also led the way in creating the smoke-free environment that exists today in most large buildings when its president, Dr…