Winter Wonderglam
When you finally escape the fam after the holidays, let loose and head to Winter Wonderglam at Fire Station No. 3. Avant-rockers Swarm of Angels (see Music) and Chicken Hawk are putting together a winter wonderland that probably wouldn’t please your ma. Swarm member Tex Kerschen says the installation entails…
Perry House
Perry House must have an odd collection of dishware. His two-dimensional paintings in “Southern Dinners” stretch the dishes’ shapes into loose, amoeboid forms. His representations of plates, platters and bowls range from chunky pottery with bold folk decoration to delicate bone china with fussy designs. His strategy of arranging them…
The G Spot
This New Age-flavored blather cracks me up,” wrote former Press staffer Lisa Gray in an e-mail. She attached a recent news release about a new restaurant called Chef g’s Seafood & Steakhouse (1915 Westheimer, 713-522-5551). “Gower Idrees, a.k.a. Chef g, awoke one morning at 3 a.m. with the answer to…
Chicago Oasis
The girl of my dreams spent as much time leaving as she did coming. She’d been gone for only a few hours, but the pain of her absence was killing me. My life is starting to sound like a Merle Haggard song, I thought to myself as I pulled into…
Black Gold
This was a magnificent year for R&B and hip-hop — that is, if you shunned commercial radio, corporate music magazines, MTV, BET and all other mainstream, hype-dolloping media outlets. If you sought good music on your own, however, there was an astounding bounty there for the taking. So here’s a…
Mexican, Straight Up
“Rock and roll is like Mexican food. As it improves in quality it stops being what it is,” wrote Dave Hickey in The Village Voice in 1975. I recall the quote to my tablemates over dinner at Hugo’s, the fancy new Mexican restaurant on Westheimer. “Rock and roll is primitive…
Tex, Lies and Audiotape
How do you take your rock and roll: straight up or steeped in mythology? For some, part of the allure of rock and roll is the back story — or at least the perceived back story. Does David Bowie really inhabit his various personae? Are the Glimmer Twins really as…
Construction Ahead
The Nouvelle Po Boy ($12.45) at Angelika Cafe & Bar (501 Texas, 713-225-1609) does not come with assembly instructions. It would be helpful if it did, since only careful assembly will guarantee success at raising it to your mouth without the contents falling out. Maybe they should go like this:…
Change of Beat
This was a yin-yang, yo-yo kind of year for Houston’s music scene. It spun down, it bounced up — and in the end everything came out as balanced as Lady Justice’s scales. As soon as a Mary Cutrufello would leave town, a Tony Avitia would come home. When the Astrodome…
Year of the Yao Woo
Every year, it seems, Houston’s chamber-of-commerce types wait anxiously for the Environmental Protection Agency to finish its annual study of just what city in the country has the foulest, most fetid, least breathable air. Sometimes the news is bad, and the EPA declares Houston’s air to be the worst. (This,…
Flush ‘Em All
“I don’t really know how to put this, but I guess it’s like Houston really kinda needed an enema,” says local record-spinner Albert Rowan, better known as D.J. Bizz. “It needs to be washed out and it needs to be reconstructed.” The metaphor is apt: 2002 was a washout, high-colonic…
Zipping Up Mary’s
The trapeze that swung from the ceiling with naked men was taken down years ago. So were the pairs of underwear stripped from newcomers and left dangling on the upper rafters. But on an evening last week, in the final hours before Mary’s Lounge closes for good, one fixture still…
Roseanna Vitro
If you wanted to enumerate Vitro’s credentials as a premier jazz vocalist, you could fill a tome as thick as Duke Ellington’s songbook. The bible of jazz periodicals, Downbeat, named her three times as “talent deserving wider recognition.” She’s performed at the Kennedy Center, hit the top five in the…
Down the Road
Several years ago the City of Houston decided to extend Avenida de las Americas by two blocks north to Minute Maid Park. But the historic, nearly 100-year-old Cohn House stood in the way. Now, after almost a year of negotiations, the city and the house’s owner have finally come to…
Beaver Nelson, with Adam Carroll and Scrappy Jud Newcomb
Beaver Nelson’s new CD, Legends of the Super Heroes, is his most diverse, intriguing batch of songs to date, reaffirming the notion that he’s a cut above your average rock-oriented Texas singer-songwriter. Nelson eagerly embraces the limitations of his thin voice and forges ahead with complex melodies that some Texas…
Wall Brawl Truce
Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters didn’t put on a concert, network anchors were nowhere to be found, and a president named Bush didn’t hail it as a momentous event, but Galveston County’s version of the Berlin Wall has been breached and a new era of peace and cooperation has dawned. Sort…
Catcher in the Sky
Everything about Catch Me If You Can, the loosely based-on-fact tale of a teenager who swindled millions while posing as, among other things, a Pan Am pilot, a doctor and a lawyer, is breezy and easy to swallow. Its maker, Steven Spielberg, hasn’t had so much fun in two decades,…
Christmas Miracle
The Houston Press Club gathered at the Hyatt Regency Hotel downtown December 17 for its annual holiday party. Invited to come along were the members of the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, so the event no doubt contained some of the shining lights of the local media…
Fishing for Compliments
This is a tricky little movie to review, as it’s going to divide audiences fairly drastically. Conservatives, especially black ones like Larry Elder and Ken Hamblin, will likely laud Antwone Fisher as a heroic story of a triumphant black man who conquers all his inner demons and outer obstacles (of…
All I Want for Christmas Is…
It’s that time of year again, when we kick back and count our blessings and spread the wretched excess among friends and those fortunate enough not to know us. Some of the gifts have already been given. Federal investigators jumped the gun by a couple of months in awarding several…
Quiet as a Rabbit
Based on the true story of three young aboriginal girls who walked 1,500 miles across the Australian outback to be reunited with their mothers, Rabbit-Proof Fence might well be subtitled True Grit in recognition of the courage and single-minded determination that drove the trio to undertake such a perilous journey…
It’s a SNAP
It’s a SNAP Fix pets to fix the problem: Dog-gone-it: It’s prevention, dummy! Wendy Grossman’s article [“In the Doghouse,” November 7] was, sadly, gut-wrenchingly, vomit-inducingly accurate. When is everyone going to get it? It’s not about building more and bigger holding pens (benevolently called shelters), a.k.a. killing facilities — the…
Fear Factor
The biggest event to happen to television this year took place at the multiplex this summer: My Big Fat Greek Wedding, a one-woman show that has blossomed into a one-woman franchise. This spring, CBS-TV will debut My Big Fat Greek Life as a midseason replacement, featuring the entire cast of…
Hold the Bubble Gum
The summer between Harby Junior High and Alvin High was a long one for drill team dancer Jessica Manley. The “really, really, really bored” teenager spent a lot of time playing on the Internet and looking forward to high school, where she’d be transformed from a Hawkette to a Jacketeer…
Make Some Noise
Wearing shoulder-length dreadlocks, size 12 1/2 EE tap shoes and a baggy hip-hop style, Savion Glover stomp-kicked his way into tap-dancing history with his performance and Tony Award-winning choreography for 1996’s Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk. The roaring, raucous, good-time show that critics have called a “strange…
That’s a Rap
These days, if you’re a rapper, it’s likely you’re also an actor. The crossover pioneered by Ice-T has become a rite of passage for rappers big and small, from local rhymer Lil’ Troy in H-Town MOB to superstars Nas and DMX in Belly. Films do great things for rappers’ careers…
The Pointe Shoe Diaries
In Houston Ballet’s version of The Nutcracker, Clara receives the gift that many little girls dream of: a pair of pink pointe shoes. She places first one foot and then the other upon a rocking chair and quickly ties the satin ribbons before gliding into her solo of pirouettes and…
New Year’s Eve
Are you a lobster thermidor kind of person or a roast suckling pig sort? What you choose to grub on New Year’s says a lot about you, so choose wisely. You could consume duck pâté at the Rotisserie for Beef and Bird (2200 Wilcrest, 713-977-9524, $68), Indonesian quail with sweet…
The Flaming Idiots
You might remember the Flaming Idiots. They’re the wild men who famously slapped together a bologna sandwich with their feet on Leno. If you missed this wondrous, er, feat, never fear: The Idiots are coming to town to boggle your brain with a wicked juggling-comedy-music show that’s gotten rave reviews…
Mitch Hedberg
Back in the day, Henny Youngman was crowned “King of the One-Liner” for his famous quip “Take my wife. Please.” That was then. Henny’s long gone, and it’s time for a new prince to take the throne. We nominate Mitch Hedberg. The man who said, “I think fettuccine Alfredo is…
The Critical Craftsman
The Menil Collection’s retrospective of H.C. Westermann’s work could not be timelier. In a city where subdivisions of McMansions are thrown up willy-nilly in a matter of weeks, it invites us to consider the uncompromising craft of a man who spent 12 years building a simple and beautiful house for…