Letters
Mono-Poly Wars Jealousy’s fine: I was thrilled to see the Houston Press article on polyamory [“Meet Mr. and Mrs. and Mrs. Jones,” by Jennifer Mathieu, November 30]. It is wonderful to have this subject treated thoughtfully and honestly. I have been practicing polyamory for all of my adult life, and…
Please, Release Me
Based on playwright Elizabeth Gilbert’s correspondence with death row inmate Cameron Todd Willingham, Release Yearning has major objectives. In the program notes, Gilbert says she wants to begin a “conversation on a subject painfully absent from public discourse.” A noble goal; too bad her script is such a bombastic bore…
Twas the Raves Before Christmas…
It’s time again for young men and women to flock home to visit their families, trim the tree, fend off advances from that drunk aunt or uncle, and get in a big-ass argument with their parents about what the hell they’re doing with their lives. The kids are gonna need…
Cy for Him
The fact that you are not required to genuflect upon entering the Menil Collection’s installation of “Cy Twombly: The Sculpture” is no doubt an easily corrected oversight on the part of the curators. The Menil’s deep and abiding adoration of Twombly is no secret, the case in point being the…
Annie, Get Your Makeover
You wouldn’t re-edit Welles or modernize Hemingway’s sexist characters, but on the Great White Way, treating the original books of musicals as first drafts is par for the course. One show that has received a major face-lift is the 1946 Annie, Get Your Gun. Gone now are the insensitive lyrics…
Clean Your Plate
Speaking off the toque: Ruth Meric, founder of Ruth Meric Catering, 3030 Audley Street, (713)522-1448 Q. As a professional, does it bother you if plates at a dinner or a party come back with uneaten food? A. Well, it does [especially] if you have put out something that you are…
Please Pass the Carcinogens
The holiday feasting season is truly upon us. We’ve survived Thanksgiving, but there is still, depending upon religious affiliation, Christmas, Hanukkah or Ramadan to get through, followed by the New Year’s Eve blowout — and this New Year’s Eve is the one that really, truly marks the start of the…
Have a Little Lamb
This is hardly what Mary intended for her fleecy friend, but for the rest of us, the best use of the barnyard animal is the lamb shanks at Tio Pepe [5213 Cedar, (713)667-4409]. While a guitarist strolls through this quaint Bellaire cafe, marked by adobe arches and secluded alcoves, diners…
Bucking the Trend
There are 10,000 professional country musicians in Nashville — and ten wanna-bes for every one of them. Sometimes it’s a thin line between the two. Late last year former Houstonian Chris Cagle was living in wanna-be-land. The gas company had turned off the heat in his cinder-block house. He had…
Creole Country
Brennan’s of Houston, 3300 Smith, (713)522-9711. Lunch is served Monday through Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.; and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Dinner is served daily from 5:45 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Creole Shack, 5519 Caplin, (713)633-3829. Hours: Sunday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.;…
The Empire Strikes Back
What do you do when you’ve created a movement, a culture even, and then are suddenly neglected for all your contributions? Apparently you get mad as hell and show everybody that with the snap of a finger, you can make them your bitch again. These days that seems to be…
Stirred and Shaken
Following the smell of wood smoke, I come upon an old Persian carpet spread out under wooden chairs in front of a fireplace. I select a rickety table not too close and not too far from the fire. A blond in a cable-knit sweater is complaining about how crowded Aspen…
Label Proof
The Asylum Street Spankers are incredibly difficult to classify, even for the members of the Austin-based band. The problem, of course, lies with the Spankers themselves, a group that’s everything and nothing at once. It’s a bluesy, jazzy, folky, even nostalgic outfit; it’s also none of those things. The contradictions…
Rap It Up
If you felt the earth quake on October 28, don’t worry. It was just the tectonic plates shifting beneath Houston’s rave culture. It was on that night that two separate raves broke from the DJ-only tradition and featured a hip-hop/rap headliner. Kids had their choice between the De Andas Ballroom…
Poe
Five years ago Poe released her debut, Hello, a session that scored well with alternative radio by mixing rock with womanhood without substantially diluting either. You could drink, hoot and holler, or contemplate with equal ease to the disc; not surprisingly, it went gold. Hello was supported by a fair…
The Big Score
The sidewalk was too rough, so Steve Biegel pushed his daughter’s stroller in the street. It was the Sunday before Halloween; Steve and his wife, Diane, were walking two blocks home from a kids’ pizza party. They had spent the afternoon on a friend’s ranch, so by 7:40 p.m. their…
Soular Slide
Some have described Houston’s Soular Slide as “kind of a jam band.” Maybe. But it definitely doesn’t peddle the kind of hippy-dippy jammin’ typically associated with the term. The tie-dye crowd would look pretty stupid swaying in place while Too Tasty for Color TV, Soular Slide’s debut, was pumping out…
In God’s Country
In the beginning, there was a bang. A very big bang. Nothing exploded into something. Quarks and leptons collided violently in an intense fireball of plasma. As the plasma expanded and cooled, the collisions became less violent, and particles joined together to form protons and neutrons and electrons, then nuclei…
Playbill
Mark Towns could barely contain his excitement on October 20. The guitarist’s debut CD, Flamenco Jazz Latino, featuring Kirk Whalum and Hubert Laws, had just hit local stores and was making its way to radio stations across the country. For the 45-year-old pro, it was time to promote the project…
Takedown
On the night of September 18, a custodian at Rice University surprised intruders who were trying to steal a video projector from the humanities building. They knocked her down and fled with a stolen flat-screen computer monitor. But instead of escaping from the campus, the thieves turned their Jeep Cherokee…
Playbill
Ever since Jill Scott hit the scene this year with her debut album, Who Is Jill Scott?: Words and Sounds Vol. I (Hidden Beach/Epic), black people have been treating her as if she were R&B’s saving grace. Listening parties for her album have been the rage at many black hangouts…
Tough on Drugs
Attorney Marc Carter had a client, 18 years old. A first-time offender, she’d been smoking crack cocaine since she was 14. She was the mother of a young child. Everyone involved in the case agreed that what she needed was rehabilitation, Carter says, and the court gave her an offer…
The Theater Shopping Network
What Women Want could be the first movie to win a Clio Award for Advertisement of the Year. No fewer than two dozen products receive prominent placement in the film, from Federal Express to Foster’s Lager to Cutty Sark to L’eggs panty hose to US Airways. After a while, you…
The Art of Seduction
“This play is about eroticism and humor,” director Ed Muth told the auditioning actors. “It’s about sex and fun. There should be banter between the characters — verbal and sexual banter — even though it’s also a powerful play. What I want you to do is to find the sex…
Jonesing for a New Groove
See, there’s this pre-Columbian emperor who’s a spoiled brat, and he gets turned into a llama, and he meets this peasant, and the two of them become buddies and save this little village…” It takes nothing away from The Emperor’s New Groove, Disney’s delightful new animated feature, to say that…
Broken and Battered
Fair warning: Enough time has passed that it’s OK to discuss the ending of writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable. Those who have not yet seen the film and intend to might want to keep on moving. Or perhaps not: To reveal the ending, all 180 or so seconds of it,…
Sex for Dummies
Assessing the merits of Quills, the lusty new feature by director Philip Kaufman (Henry and June), it’s tempting to seek correlative characters from popular movies, to illustrate just how radical this business is not. In Kaufman’s film, we discover a fairly standard dichotomy: Geoffrey Rush is the Marquis de Sade,…
Bet You Can’t Vote for Just One!
With swarms of writers from the likes of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Miami Herald analyzing every electoral oddity in the political hothouse of Florida, The Insider just couldn’t resist attempting the same exercise at the Harris County courthouse. Just imagine, and it admittedly takes…
Ease on Down the Aisle
The best deal of the holiday season may just be William F. Brown and Charlie Smalls’s The Wiz, a soulfully sweet and funny take on The Wizard of Oz that’s running at the 100 percent kid-friendly Arena Theatre. Where else can your little munchkins see a dancing yellow brick road,…