On the Mend
On “Sell Out,” the lead track of her latest EP, post-punk songstress Juliana Hatfield sings, “It’s not a sell-out if nobody buys it.” And indeed, that conclusion, while somewhat obvious, is more applicable to the longtime Bostonian’s brushes with fame than one might imagine. The fact is, Hatfield has been…
See Juarez
Editor’s note: Charles Bowden first came across the work of the Juarez street photographers while reporting on a murder in El Paso three years ago. His research took him to the dirt streets of Ciudad Juarez, where drug murders, gang killings and the disappearances of dozens of young women who…
Static
Belated grief… At first, I was content to let the death of INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence — who was found hanging nude from the doorway of a hotel suite in his native Australia on November 22 — pass without so much as a mention. As the tabloid rumors swirled…
Rotation
Spice Girls Spiceworld Virgin So what do you want to hear? That the Spice Girls suck? That they’re nothing but shills pandering to 12-year-old girls and brain-dead listeners to Top 40? Sure, I could say that about the Spice Girls, but at this point, bashing them seems senseless. The fact…
Career Girls
You’d think that because they have the same come-hither pose, the same brashly aggressive appeal and — when it comes right down to it — the same act, hip-hop bad girl Lil’ Kim and her Def Jam mirror image Foxy Brown would be at each other’s throats. So it’s a…
Hail to the ’80s
Brace yourself. It’s coming. Nostalgia for the ’80s, that is. And it’s barreling full-speed toward music consumers, disco balls bobbing in its wake. I should know, after all. Statistics show that my thirtysomething demographic is the one expending all the expendable income these days. And for what it’s worth, history…
Christmas Treats
The Christmas season has barely begun, and already visitors are sitting politely in your living room, waiting for you to entertain them. You blab about the balmy Houston winters. You grunt a little over those turncoat Tennessee Oilers. You nod your head about how you’re getting on pretty well at…
New Faces, Old Dance
Give the Houston Ballet credit for this: At the two recent performances of The Nutcracker that I saw, the children in the audience seemed to be having a marvelous time. When the mice fought the toy soldiers in the middle of the first act, they tittered in appreciation. When the…
Second Time as Farce
Wes Craven’s Scream, which opened almost exactly a year ago, was the surprise hit of an overcrowded Christmas season. In part, the success was a triumph of counter-programming: In the midst of a glut of classy Oscar contenders, Scream was the only teen horror film. And it was helped by…
Civics Lesson
Steven Spielberg’s Amistad is being given the big picture treatment — Schindler’s List big, not Jurassic Park big. Last week’s Newsweek featured the film on its cover, calling it “Spielberg’s controversial new movie,” even though it had not yet been released and the only “controversy” was a legal one about…
Perfect Pitch
The incident could have been a disaster. But for John Axelrod, it became just one more sales opportunity. Axelrod, a young conductor and composer, had been back in his hometown of Houston for a few months pushing what he claimed was the future of symphonic music. Orchestra X, he called…
The Insider
An Election-Day Tale of Two (or Three) Cities There may have been a great historic moment for Houston race relations sometime on the evening of December 6 as Lee Patrick Brown edged past Rob Mosbacher to become the city’s first African-American mayor. But if you blinked, you missed it. The…
(Not) of Counsel
One of the hallowed precepts of the American justice system is that a defendant is entitled to the counsel of his choice — or at least the best counsel that he can afford. For Dan De La Garza, a Woodlands businessman facing federal money-laundering charges, that was Kent Schaffer and…
“Boom Boom” Goes Bust
“I got no money, judge,” Alvin “Boom Boom” Jackson plaintively told a bankruptcy trustee at Houston’s federal courthouse. A few minutes later, after parrying questions about his sorry financial condition, the hulking 45-year-old offered another summary of his pitiful state: “I’m just a poor black child.” The December 2 hearing…
Letters
Unseen Hand Great story on the “Sports Afield” [by Richard Connelly, November 20]. Ever get the impression that the Authority just moves around on preset strings pulled by the behind-the-scenes manipulators? Jeff Lehmann via Internet Lest We Forget… The citizens of Houston and Harris County need to be watchful of…
Press Picks
thursday december 11 The History of Playing Cards These days, we can get a set at Eckerd for a couple of bucks, but the first decks of colored lithographed playing cards were so costly to produce that they sent one company into bankruptcy. A set of these cards — along…
Dish
Shuffle Off for Buffalo Aging usually intensifies the flavor of meat. In the case of the bone cut of buffalo that Sierra has begun serving, the process also removes any hint of the gamy overtones that often put people off this less-than-common dish. A server told me that aging is…
The Boom Is Back
Twenty years ago, I arrived in Houston just in time for the oil boom. The late ’70s were the best of times: dizzying, exciting; what I imagine the San Francisco Gold Rush must have been like in the late 1840s. Symbols of opulence and excess abounded: a helipad atop every…