A Real Dog
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s astonishingly successful Cats yowled on Broadway for nearly two decades. In fact, in the summer of 1997, it pranced its way into the record books when it became the longest-running show in Broadway’s history. This makes the musical, which was built around T.S. Eliot’s charming and silly…
Raking It In
You may have noticed it around town lately — a half-dozen or so cop cars at some intersection, pulling over motorists in order to give the cars a good inspection and find something to ticket. We’ve seen at least two of the operations recently, and it looked like HPD was…
Capsule Reviews
A Christmas Story Country Playhouse bathes Jean Shepherd’s nostalgia-laden Christmas memoirs of his 1930s boyhood in a deep autumnal glow that’s as toasty and warm as a snowsuit and mittens. Shepherd’s short stories from In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash were adapted into a sleeper of a holiday…
Letters to the Editor
All Up in the Family Fair article: I was born in Lima, Peru, and was in the Family till a couple of years ago, when I decided I didn’t want a part of it anymore [“Family Ties,” by Craig Malisow, November 17]. I left and joined the army and am…
Grab Bag
“New Texas Painting,” curated by DiverseWorks visual arts director Diane Barber, presents work from 14 Texas artists. Regional surveys are often problematic, and with broad categories like “new,” “Texas” and “painting” as the organizing principle of a show, it’s bound to feel disjointed. But regional surveys do act as a…
Image of the Week
Lillian Gallegos practices her pose backstage at the John Sherman Bodybuilding, Fitness & Figure Championships held at the University of Houston’s Cullen Theater…
Capsule Reviews
“KCHO: Every Man Is an Island” The artist Kcho was born on Cuba’s tiny Isla de la Juventud. His work is imbued with melancholy, and this exhibition is filled with references to water, isolation, poverty and escape. Kcho’s 2003 installation Para Olvidar (“To Forget”) consists of an actual fishing pier…
The Pet Next Door
The dancer’s long, muscular legs are swirling as she arches her back, cups her perky bare breasts and gives my friends and me a “Want some of this?” look. Not tonight, Lacey. We’re here at the new Penthouse Club, formerly Caligula, to meet Jamie Lynn, Penthouse magazine’s Pet of the…
Virtual Quagmire
Publisher: Ubisoft
Platform: PS2 and XBox
Price: $49.99
ESRB Rating: T (for Teen)
Score: 6 (out of 10)
Kapusta Kristmas
For several years back in the ’80s and ’90s, rock and roll keyboard legend Al Kooper had a very cool yuletide custom. Kooper was (and is) an avid collector of prank calls, celebrity (and some non-celebrity) bloopers, weird songs, hilarious answering-machine messages and studio banter, and each December he would…
They’ve Got Game
The year 2005 may be the last hurrah for this generation’s aging consoles, but sugar, they’re going down swingin’. The PlayStation 2, Xbox and Game Cube age gracefully, pushing their hardware to the limit one last time and developing some brilliant games in the process — from tear-jerking, giant-slaying adventure…
Stairway to Heaven
This past year has easily been the weakest of the three since we started stealing Greil Marcus’s method of scoring rock and roll deaths. As with every year, the reaper’s bushel includes some famous names — Link Wray, Luther Vandross, Chris Whitley, Gatemouth Brown, Jimmy Martin and Jimmie Smith among…
Generation Next
Microsoft isn’t often described as an underdog. But in the world of video games, Sony’s PlayStation is king, and all others fight for scraps. While Microsoft’s Xbox managed to bump the once great Nintendo into third place, it nevertheless remains a distant second to the PS2, which commands an installed…
Confessions of an Airbrushed Anglophile
Throughout her ever-changing incarnations — Material Girl, religious provocateur, dominatrix, crypt keeper — one thing Madonna has remained is honest. Whether she’s hitchhiking naked, exploring Jewish mysticism or feeling super duper about her Mini Cooper, Mama M has never had a problem telling the American public exactly what she’s thinking…
Love the Sin
Sin City: Recut, Extended, Unrated (Buena Vista) Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s near frame-for-frame adaptation of Miller’s bone-crunching comics finally gets a rewarding DVD treatment, following a shamefully sparse edition earlier this year. The theatrical cut boasts two commentary tracks (with Quentin Tarantino and Bruce Willis, among others), but there…
Bif Naked
It makes perfect sense that Bif Naked has a pseudo-love song to Henry Rollins (simply titled “Henry”) on her new album, Superbeautifulmonster, since she’s essentially ol’ Hank’s female, Canadian analog: a heavily tattooed, straight-edge, onetime punk rock singer who’s got some spoken-word albums under her belt and is usually found…
Our top DVD picks for the week of December 13
Bad News Bears (2005) (Paramount) The Beautiful Country (Sony) Death Race 2000: Special Edition (Buena Vista) F.I.S.T. (Columbia/Tristar) Gallipoli: Special Edition (Paramount) Gilmore Girls: The Complete Fifth Season (Warner Bros.) The Island (Universal) Kiss: Rock the Nation Live! (Image) The Last Day (Strand) Marvin Gaye: Behind the Legend (Red Dist.)…
Spain Coloured Orange
Spain Coloured Orange is an apt name. The spelling of “Coloured” gives away their Anglophilic tendencies, while both “Spain” and “Orange” connote warmth and sunshine. And their national debut EP, Hopelessly Incapable of Standing in the Way, is nothing if not redolent of a bunch of warm-sounding bands. Think ELO,…
Tale of Two Cities
In North Vietnam’s misty Halong Bay, a French warship swallowed the children of God. It ferried them in its belly through a maze of towering stone islands and into the South China Sea. The Roman Catholics named the vessel Open Mouth. It was gaping and unpredictable to the Vietnamese penitents,…
Cave In, with Doomriders and Lorene Drive
Chunklet magazine’s indispensable and spot-on “Overrated Issue, pt II” is just the tool any discernable music aficionado needs this coming Commerce-mas. Specifically, the article titled “Band Bio Dictionary,” wherein staff writer and Polyphonic Spree drummer (“Oil, meet water”) Brian Teasley teaches all who care how to break down that terminally…
Knitta, Please!
She’s always been an impatient knitter: half of a blanket, a quarter of a hat, a sliver of a scarf. She has to intertwine her hobby with a full-time job, a daughter and a boyfriend. Last May she began working on a baby blanket for an expectant friend; by September…
Peanut Butter Wolf
Our prayers have been answered! Peanut Butter Wolf is finally bringing his crates and his turntable know-how down to these parts. For a while there, some of us thought it would never happen. We thought there’d be another Bush in the White House (Jenna, probably) before someone from the Stones…
Don’t Worry, Be Happy
It began with e-mails that had made the round of parents and finally got to the Houston Press. Phone calls followed. Houston school superintendent Abe Saavedra was looking to eliminate the Vanguard program, the special magnet program for gifted and talented students. The kindergarten-through-eighth grade T.H. Rogers was on the…
Monkey Business
For whatever reason, the modernized, comic redo of King Kong released exactly 29 years ago has become less the “pop classic” that Pauline Kael insisted it was at the time than a dimly remembered punch line. It barely registers with modern-day moviegoers, who remember it as a campy, eco-aware update…
Sushi as an Accessory
It was a Thursday night, and Uptown Sushi was packed to the gills. Throbbing techno music made it feel like we were entering a dance club. The black-clad hostess led my companion and me past the loud cocktail-lounge area to the only two seats left at the crowded sushi bar…
Homo on the Range
It’s not hard to predict how Ang Lee’s controversial Brokeback Mountain will play in John Wayne country. This romantic tragedy about a pair of lean, wind-burned cowpokes who secretly live to poke each other flies in the face of everything that most people in Casper or Riverton or Laramie think…
Doing It Right
The veal puttanesca ($19.95) at Mangola’s (11786 South Wilcrest, 281-498-7950) is a seductive, exciting dish worthy of its name, which means “whore’s veal.” As with many things culinary, there are several versions of the dish’s origins. My favorite is that it was invented by Neapolitan prostitutes, who made this simple,…
Asia Minor
“Agony and beauty for us live side by side,” laments Mameha (Michelle Yeoh), the most successful geisha in Gion. You’ll know how she feels: Memoirs of a Geisha, as directed by Chicago’s Rob Marshall, is beautiful to look at, but when it comes to the dialogue and storytelling, agony just…
Flying High
It’s the end of the weekend, the super-long shitty weekend of all weekends. I find myself at the Flying Saucer Draught Emporium (705 Main). My very own personal safe haven, my home away from home, if you will. Cheers has nothing on the Saucer. Everyone does know my name, and…
Oh, Joy
One cannot, in good conscience, describe the countless strands of plot and strains of characters skittering through The Family Stone without knowing that description merits at least a snicker…Okay, all right, bellowing guffaws. The movie’s too overstuffed by half with pointless people and plot lines that dangle like warning signs,…