Twisp of the Tale
Contained within a care package sent by C.D. Payne is a self-penned press release introducing the author as “the Rodney Dangerfield of comic novelists,” complete with a picture of the bug-eyed comedian and his shopworn catchphrase “I can’t get no respect.” As it turns out, this is the letter Payne…
Mexican Combo Plate
It’s where Walter Huston found paradise at the end of The Treasure of Sierra Madre, where murdering lovers Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw rode into the sunset at the end of The Getaway, and where Thelma and Louise were headed when they ended up at the Grand Canyon. There are…
Letters
Ministry Magic Christ and convicts: As a mentor at the Carol Vance Unit, I read your article on the InnerChange Freedom Initiative [“From Cells to Souls,” by Mark Donald, December 7] with great interest. I hope you will do a follow-up when IFI releases the statistics on the program. I…
A Box of Chocolat
Here you will find the ingredients required to whip an audience into the throes of fuzzy warmheartedness — the hope, the compassion, the joie de vivre — all blended with the skill of a consummate confectioner. Much like a box of sweets with a convenient guide inside the lid, Lasse…
Dead Puppies for Christmas
To call it a museum is misleading. And the term “weird,” though accurate, doesn’t quite do it justice. What the Museum of the Weird is, in actuality, is artist Dolan Smith’s Heights home, which displays a lot of artwork, as well as found and inherited objects. “It’s sort of come…
Rewriting History
Finding Forrester is the latest film from Gus Van Sant, one of the true American originals to emerge in the ’80s and ’90s. When Van Sant is at his best, he gives us stories and images we’ve never seen before. Finding Forrester, however, is not Gus Van Sant at his…
Donny Rules!
How cool is Donny Osmond? After joking about Rosie O’Donnell’s weight on her show, Osmond not only apologized for the gaffe, he sang “Puppy Love” to the Queen of Nice while dressed in a dog suit. Think any supposedly “cool” act like Snoop Dogg would ever have the guts to…
Recycled Gifts
The Family Man offers but a slight variation on the threadbare holiday theme of what life might have been like had Our Hero followed a different path — or never been born. Not only is it a redo of It’s a Wonderful Life — complete with an angel (played by…
Brave Nuevo World
A Six-Part History of Tex-Mex In the good old days, Texans went to “Mexican restaurants” and ate “Mexican food.” Then in 1972 The Cuisines of Mexico, an influential cookbook by food authority Diana Kennedy, drew the line between authentic interior Mexican food and the “mixed plates” we ate at “so-called…
Family Ties (That Bind)
The moods of Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me are so artfully mingled that it’s difficult to get a fix on this highly personal independent feature. Set in a quiet little town in upstate New York’s lovely Catskill Mountains, it is at once a drama about the unresolved traumas…
Cold Comfort
As far as icehouses go, scholarship suggests the Chinese got there first. As early as the eighth century B.C.E., they stored ice in caves or pits, using the evaporation from the surface to keep the rest of the mass frozen. In Britain, the first recorded icehouse was built in 1619…
Flea Smitten
Fleas typically inspire little more than creative ideas on how to kill ’em: One ancient Egyptian solution advises coating a naked slave in donkey milk and leaving him in the plagued bedchamber one hour before retiring. In sharp contrast to humanity’s unending battle to destroy the flea, Maria Fernanda Cardoso…
Bagging Its Own
It was the kind of opportunity an indie musician dreams about: an invitation to play the SXSW music conference in Austin, where industry execs and media weasels can (theoretically) make or break an act. Matt Brownlie had one of those coveted invites in his very hand, thanks to a pair…
Economic Fasting
Speaking off the toque: Sam Said, owner and general manager of Cedars Mediterranean Cafe [4703 Richmond Avenue, (713)572-9445]. This December, while Christians celebrate Christmas and Jews celebrate Hanukkah, Muslims celebrate the most important holiday on their calendar, the Fast of Ramadan. Ramadan is the ninth month of the Muslim calendar,…
Achy Breaky Voice
Imagine you’re a singer, and without any cause or explanation, the muscles that control your vocal cords begin to contract. As they slam shut, your voice gets tighter until each word is a broken croak or a breathy whisper. The symptoms come and go, often varying during the day, but…
Cajun Choice
Many diners hate decisions. Sometimes we sit there and numbly stare at menus that have too much to offer, as paralyzed as a deer in the path of an oncoming 18-wheeler. Thank heavens for the combo étouffée platter ($10.95) at Boudreaux’s Cajun Kitchen [5475 West Loop South, (713)838-2200]. Like a…
Moore Is More
Ian Moore lives in the Pacific Northwest now, but he still talks like a Texan, particularly when he shouts, Don’t fence me in. “People need to let me go,” insists Moore. The topic of conversation is the expectations of the music industry versus personal artistry, a subject that engages Moore…
Stirred and Shaken
With its glittering mosaics and oversize artworks, the place looks like an art gallery when empty. Wedged into a corner of a red leatherette banquette, my date and I are doing dessert while supervising the closing ritual at La Griglia [2002 West Gray, (713)526-4700]. The chairs are all unoccupied, and…
Kristi’s Gift
The straightest path from Houston to Lake Jackson is 288 South. The road cuts into the flat, open fields like a piece of black ribbon, racing along for miles. When Kristi Weaver drives that road in her white Plymouth Horizon — the one with no radio and the driver’s-side door…
John Prine
It’s usually not a good sign when an artist rerecords his best material. Generally it’s either a blatant cash-in or an indication of creative infertility. But with John Prine’s Souvenirs, a collection of 15 classics done anew, neither is the case. Yes, it’s been five years since we heard an…
Life in the Abstract
Some painters care only about color, form and technique. Dorothy Hood was emphatically not one of them; such bloodless art, she wrote, “is hardly a thing the soul can bear.” Her gigantic paintings existed to transmit emotion: joy, discomfort, mourning or anger. Dorothy Hood called the paintings “landscapes of my…
Marilyn Manson
The time has come to tear down the false deities which imprison us. If you’ve been oppressed, you are not alone. Our sort is legion. Nobody understands how torturous this existence has become. Not even excess is excessive anymore. We have but to implode. Yet the world will continue on,…
On the Rocks
Frosty the Snowman was a jolly, happy soul. Until a mean little guy locked him in the greenhouse and he melted into mush. There was nothing left but his hat, pipe and a puddle. Anybody who watches Christmas cartoons knows that the idea of an outdoor skating rink in this…
Gel
For a debut that gets off to a painfully rocky start — think Nine Inch Nails on a chalkboard — Gel’s Box of Toys manages to cough up a couple of funky playthings by the end of the eight-song recording. To reach that point, unfortunately you have to wade through…
Finale to the Feud
After a four-day trial that laid open the Cardwell family closet, Cody Cardwell was acquitted of murdering his older brother Bill in a confrontation on the family ranch more than three years ago. The verdict brought to a close a case that has bitterly divided one of Kimble County’s pioneering…
Playbill
Damon Bramblett, the pride of Bangs, Texas, is a tall drink of water with a voice like Johnny Cash. Comparisons to The Man in Black are utterly unavoidable, even though Bramblett’s voice is pitched a half-octave or so higher. The similarities lie in Bramblett’s Cash-like quaver and, more vaguely, in…
Hard Call
Elizabeth Ann Gilderson grew up in Canterbury, England, during World War II. She was a teacher because, she says, all women in England back then were nurses or teachers, and “that’s what we all did.” She married and moved with her husband, a research chemist, to Edmonton in the Canadian…
Playbill
Texans are rightly chauvinistic about many things, especially our music. And if there’s one style that’s indelibly Texan, it’s western swing. So how is it that one of the most fascinating new wrinkles within this well-worn genre was formed in New York City? (Get a rope.) Whatever its origins, the…
West U Journal Feud
Last summer, the publisher and executive editor of the West University Journal told a Houston Business Journal reporter she was getting out of the community newspaper publishing business and going back to her true calling as a writer. Beverly Denver, who had just been named small newspaper print journalist of…
Mansion on the Hill
Hidden behind Richmond Strip favorites like Billy Blues Bar & Grill (6025 Richmond) and Polly Esther’s (6111 Richmond), The Mansion (6303 Beverly Hill) is a lavish hangout that dares to break from the blindingly white traditions of the area and actually cater to folks whom some Strip regulars would just…
A Holiday Wish
Access Texas is a glossy magazine that tries to be a step or two above the dreary level of those rags consisting mostly of party photos surrounded by ads for plastic surgeons who also write health columns. (How best to lose those holiday pounds? Try liposuction!) The December issue of…
Special Delivery
During the summer of 1994, while most of the world was greeting Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump with dewy eyes and outstretched arms, this critic was grinning his fool head off at a very different tale of a lost, lone hero. While a featherweight Tom Hanks bumbled his lobotomized way through…