Real Life
It’s an early December day in downtown Houston. The warm, muggy morning has become a chilly afternoon of persistent drizzle, the region’s first rainfall in six months. Cold gusts of wind sweep across the buildings on the corner of San Jacinto and Rusk, which is lined with vintage sedans and…
He Will Survive
Before us now, here at the end days, straddling a piano bench between ourselves and the millennium, we have Mr. Ezra Charles, pianist, songwriter and bandleader. Mr. Charles is a young-looking 55 years old, but starting nonetheless, in his own words, to sag a little. His vaguely roosterish head is…
Free Birds and Drop Kick Chihuhahas
Every dance club, beer pub and yuppie hub in town is having its own New Year’s Eve celebration with live music and cheap champagne, but the two largest blowouts for the sonically inclined will appeal to two distinct audiences: Gap-ad lovin’ Buzz Nation kids and Rebel Rousers who remember when…
Houston’s Big Experiment
The offices of Ironwood Homes are in an upstairs bedroom of a display house on Hidalgo Street, a half-mile southeast of the Galleria. It’s a small space that, unlike most offices, doesn’t say much about the business it houses; there aren’t any testimonials to Ironwood’s record of customer satisfaction, for…
Belles with Balls
Caroline Picard, a.k.a. the Cajun Queen, once drove through a blizzard over Loveland Pass, Colorado, in her two-wheel-drive Mazda pickup to perform for a mere 200 bucks. Now that’s dedication. She has put over 225,000 miles on that truck, doing her blue comedy all over the country. “What people don’t…
Waldhauser Watch
On that October day, Michael Lee Davis initially displayed the sort of quick, big smile seen on most budding business entrepreneurs encountering a potential client. From behind the receptionist’s desk of his posh downtown Dallas office, Davis, as vice president of Southwest Viatical, greeted me as a likely customer for…
Out with the New
Yes, Virginia, there is a New Renata’s. While the “old” Renata’s offered continental cuisine with an Italian accent, the “new” one offers continental cuisine with an Asian accent, courtesy of chef Zumm Escudier. Yet underneath this mostly cosmetic makeover remains one sad, unavoidable blemish: It’s still a place where fawning…
J-U-N-K in the Y2K
I hadn’t heard from Butch Forest since about this time last year, when I had just finished writing about the La Porte entrepreneur and his semi-industrial brand of living off the land in a Houston Press cover story [“King of the Pile,” December 17, 1998], but the voice on the…
Hot Plate
Nuts to You, Ben and Jerry: A third “super-premium” brand of ice cream has recently elbowed its way into Houston’s grocery freezers, competing with Häagen-Dazs and our good buddies from Vermont. The prettily packaged pints ($2.99 to $3.49) of Dreyer’s new Dreamery lineup feature some of the usual suspects –…
Code Cops
Mary Bentley chased gang members out of her Spring Branch neighborhood almost four years ago, but she believed they had come back when she turned down her narrow street on a dark night almost a month ago. There was no gunfire or graffiti, no mysterious hand signals or symbolic colors…
Ladies in Blue
It is 5 p.m. on a Sunday, and both blues and barbecue are really cooking. In a southeast Houston establishment that epitomizes the organic link between this sound and this food, Rena Singleton is seated at her regular table. And in her own words, she is “as close to heaven”…
The Many Faces of Michael:
In the five years since Ben Reyes left City Council and eventually entered federal prison on bribery and conspiracy convictions, there has been little doubt who took over the title of sleaziest elected Houston official. A fellow councilmember calls the close-quarters view of Councilman Michael Yarbrough “amazing and fascinating.” “He…
Where Will They Be?
Lists for this. Lists for that. We here at the Houston Press are sick ‘n’ tired o’ lists. So what we decided to do for our millennium-ending issue is dial up Dionne Warwick’s psychic hot line and look 20-plus years into music future. Here’s what we heard… Madonna — Her…
The Insider
In six years of representing District B’s impoverished north Houston precincts, Councilman Michael Yarbrough and Richard Johnson, his boyhood pal and former top aide, proved you can bend and break city campaign finance rules like pretzels and never suffer negative consequences. The whippet-thin, dapper-dressing Yarbrough and the burly, six-five Army…
Sophomore Flops
Sophomore slump. Sophomore jinx. One-hit wonder. The idea that a band can release one record then either fade into oblivion or fail miserably with its next is so common it’s cliché. The story goes something like this: Band writes and rehearses songs for years. Record company signs band. Band records…
News of the Weird
Lead StoriesSaskatchewan physician John Schneeberger, 38, implanted a thin, six-inch tube of someone else’s blood in his own arm in order to beat a DNA test ordered because two female patients said Schneeberger raped them. He cut open his bicep, inserted the tube and pushed it down to the crook…
Amplified
ZZ Top’s latest record, XXX, includes ambient sound recorded at a surprise Fitzgerald’s performance a few months ago. The show was by invite only and was supposed to give guests a glimpse at the new direction these hirsute boys from Houston would be taking into the millennium. It had been…
Dish
It’s official: Houston’s landmark Felix Mexican Restaurant [904 Westheimer, (713)529-3949] is open again for business. The 50-year-old family-run restaurant, a favorite of celebs such as Linda Ellerbee and Marvin Zindler as well as almost every other native Houstonian home or abroad, closed last July after a rooftop fire that wreaked…
Rotation
Master P Only God Can Judge Me No Limit When the Houston Press reviewed Master P’s alleged “last” album, Da Last Don, we stated it would not be the last time we heard ole P grunt and groan on the mike. We wrote: P is “probably working on his ‘comeback’…
Local Rotation
Bamboo Crisis Konspirosphere ToneZone Records There is a wide span of territory to navigate in electronic music. If darkwave equals coldwave, then what are EBM and electro? Industrial, by contrast, seems easier to categorize because of clear-cut differences between industrial pop and industrial dance (i.e., you can’t dance to Nine…
Playbill
Mojo Nixon’s appeal comes from a riotous combination of his rockabilly-inspired adolescent humor and his disdain for icons. For the better part of 15 years, Nixon has laid his cards out on the table. It’s all there in the song titles: “Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant with My Two-Headed Love Child,”…
Houstowne, Texas
By almost any measure you can name, whether it’s the increase in population, industrial production or construction of single-family homes, the current millennium has been one of the best in Houston’s history. And that’s not even taking into account Fort Bend County, which had itself a pretty good millennium, too…
Disney Lightens Up
Sixty years after the release of the original Fantasia, Disney has finally gotten around to making new musical segments for a reprise of the film’s classical-music-cum-animation concept. Cleverly timed and titled to open on the first day of the new millennium — and regardless of any calendar disputes, you might…
We’re No. 1!
Image-conscious Houston has finally achieved world-class status as the millennium draws to a close. As of October 7, when ozone levels in Deer Park left citizens gasping for breath, Houston became a world-class Shit City, the most polluted in the United States. Trying to put the best possible spin on…
Handheld Torture
For whatever reason, this latest Belgian import to the United States has an almost identical title to the year’s other major Belgian import. What’s more, there are similarities, in both subject matter and technique, between Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Rosetta, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival,…
The Good, the Bad, the Imprisoned
Anyone attempting to compile a list of the all-time top politicians in Houston’s history faces a problem of definition. For a good part of the city’s history, the men who created our freewheeling laissez-faire dynamo of the western hemisphere, the poster child for urban sprawl and pollution, didn’t answer to…
Downing
About seven years ago the Reverend Joe Samuel Ratliff had a vision. He saw that God wanted him to expand his church’s ministry to people with AIDS. God didn’t just want church volunteers to go into the inner city to minister to AIDS patients. God didn’t just want the church…
Image Augmentation
For better or worse, Houston introduced the wider world to such 20th-century marvels as Astroturf, enclosed shopping malls and restaurant fajitas, and each of those creations says something about the city. But none evokes the place quite so precisely as the silicone breast implant, invented here in 1962 by doctors…