Swing Crazy
More than half a century ago, when folks were kicking the gong around and asking if youse a viper, bands like the Squirrel Nut Zippers haunted speakeasies by the dozen. Now, the Zippers find themselves among only a handful of bands that embody the raucous spirit of those unbridled days,…
A Boy’s Life
When playwright David Saar’s eight-year-old son Benjamin died of AIDS-related complications in 1987, Saar did what most parents who lose a child do. He grieved. Fortunately for contemporary theater, he also wrote a play in tribute to Benjamin titled The Yellow Boat. As the artistic director of one of the…
Rotation
Johnny Cash Unchained American Recordings In 1994, just as his myth was in danger of being destroyed by too many mediocre releases, Johnny Cash was rescued from the country-music trash heap and restored to the sort of honorary status afforded those rare musicians who survive — much less prosper –…
Making Connections
Seated in Lawndale Art & Performance Center’s main gallery, artist Mark Lombardi tells me a story: Shortly after he arrived in Houston, a woman friend of his married a wealthy investment broker, who later disappeared. A charred body found in the broker’s Jaguar was never, Lombardi says, positively identified. The…
Static
Trick or trifle… Cheap Trick didn’t mean to become a ’70s answer to the Beatles, it’s just that their timing was so impeccable and their intentions so real. The Illinois quartet — comprising Robin Zander, Rick Nielsen, Tom Petersson and Bun E. Carlos — came up the right way, via…
Oh, God
Whitney Houston has had a Movie Star Moment — just not in a movie. Near the end of the “I’m Saving All My Love for You” video, she turns toward the camera with a luminous smile that wilts into heartbreak when she’s realizes she’s been dropped by her, um, boyfriend…
Cruisified
Some amusing stuff about sports agentry drowns in the emotional shallows of Jerry Maguire, which stars Tom Cruise (in the title role) as a hotshot dealmaker whose first bout of conscience torpedoes his future at his firm, the monolithic Sports Management International. After visiting a hospitalized hockey player who skated…
It’s Topps!
Forget Independence Day. If you really want to see Earth get it, you can’t do any better than Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! It’s a destructo orgy orchestrated without any phony-baloney sanctimony about the fellowship of man — or spaceman. Burton isn’t interested in intergalactic amity; he’s not even interested in…
Ain’t That a Ditch
Hiram Butler arrived in Magnolia Grove about nine years ago, a man of some means and aesthetic sensibility who ran an art gallery out of a renovated laundromat on Kirby near Greenway Plaza. Butler bought a three-quarter-acre plot of land that was settled in the 1880s by a German cabinetmaker…
Radack-al Treatment
County Commissioner Steve Radack had been feuding with County Judge Robert Eckels for nearly two years, almost since the day Eckels assumed the top spot at Commissioners Court. The two seemed destined to clash: Radack, 47, is a former cop, an old hand as Precinct 3 commissioner and an accomplished…
The Insider
Straight Outta West U With the prospect of a wide-open Houston mayoral race set to begin just after the New Year, an unlikely candidate is stirring in the WASPy environs of West University Place: Rob Mosbacher, a 45-year-old independent oilman, lawyer and term-limits activist who’s been busy chatting up his…
Les’s Turn
If Rockets owner Les Alexander’s dispute with Aeros owner Chuck Watson were as simple as coming across with a few million bucks to break a lease, a new downtown basketball arena would be just a mayoral edict and another referendum away from reality. But the lease is only one piece…
Letters
Only a Knothead Gives It Up Jim Simmon did an amazing turnabout in his column [“Champions!”] for your November 14 issue: He owned right up to being a lame-brained knothead by voting for the stadium proposition. He then followed with all the reasons why a rational voter would vote no…
Press Picks
thursday december 12 Shine and romance If the goober at the center of Shine can find true love, then your chances must be super! This event offers hopeful singles a chance to fill out a free Houston Press Romance ad and then enjoy, gratis, a preview of Shine. It’s the…
A Night in Old Moscow
I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Eastern Europe, but I haven’t been anywhere like Svetlana since that night long ago when I went to a Red Army dine and dance club on a little side street near the Kremlin with a pal who’d used his father’s Politburo ID…
Dish
Doing the Time Warp Houston’s full of contempo-wannabe restaurants where the cuisine is clever and the decor ab-fab to say the least; mercifully, Ducho’s Steak House isn’t one of them. For decades this homely time warp has been hiding on a small residential street perpendicular to North Shepherd at the…
Think Hard
Coaxing Celindine’s Trey Pool out of his protective shell takes patience. But if you don’t have the time to get to know him, he recommends nicotine and alcohol to help loosen the tension. Still, even after a few beers and half an ashtray’s worth of cigarettes, the 28-year-old singer/guitarist has…
Decay Becomes Him
His upper teeth are nearly gone now; they have been replaced by tiny slivers of off-white that peek through rotten gums. His lower teeth, thin and brown, appear ready to fall out if he so much as coughs too hard. His lips are pale and dry, coated with spit so…