Admirable Ape
In 1933, producer Merian C. Cooper, director Ernest B. Schoedsack and pioneering animator Willis O’Brien created one of this century’s most indelible and powerful archetypes: King Kong. Then they did a peculiar thing: As if appalled at what they had wrought — but also delighted at the money it made…
Nuit Prowler
“During my first years in Paris,” wrote French photographer Brassai, “beginning in 1924, I lived at night, going to bed at sunrise, getting up at sunset, wandering about the city from Montparnasse to Montmartre. And even though I had always ignored and even disliked photography before, I was inspired to…
Year of Yearning
Silver lining or slender thread? That question nags at me as I go over my best-of-the-year list. There were some terrific movies in 1998 — eight, according to my count. But the average film keeps on getting worse. If movies remain as synthetic and incompetent as they are for the…
Virgin Rebirth
He isn’t saying it was a miracle, that an angel of God guided him to a particular place at a particular time and said, “Here she is.” He’s not saying that at all. But he’s not saying it was entirely coincidental, either. After one coincidence leads to another, and then…
Eight for ’98
Critic Michael Sragow picks his best films of the year, in alphabetical order: Babe: Pig in the City. As a fairy tale of an imperiled innocent in a chaotic and threatening metropolis, George Miller’s follow-up to Babe ranks with Carol Reed’s Oliver! and is the most genuinely Dickensian film to…
News of the Weird
Lead Stories *The November Canadian Finals Rodeo in Edmonton, Alberta, featured the very popular “Cowboy Poker,” in which four men sit at a table in the middle of the arena “playing cards,” while a particularly aggressive bull is turned loose. As the bull rushes them, the last cowboy to stay…
False Sense of Security
As Friday night gave in to Saturday morning, Jennifer Morey was putting up one hell of a fight. “Please help me, I’m bleeding so much,” Morey pleaded with the 911 dispatcher. “He cut my throat. I’ve got pressure on it, but it’s spraying blood all over.” A few hours earlier,…
Santa’s Push Cards
Aspirants for Houston City Council are always thinking up new and ingenious ways to get a foot in the City Hall door, but attorney Gordon Quan may be the first to try to ride in on Santa’s sleigh. Quan is bombarding a selected political mailing list with his family Christmas…
Letters
Scotch the Sodas As the mom of a brilliant, gifted and talented child who has a deficit of attention and an abundance of energy, I can’t thank you enough for publishing “Carbonated Cash” by Kimberly Reeves [December 17]. I feel angry and frustrated at schools, blinded by profits they earn…
Slipping Under the Bar Radar
You figure the three lawyers representing the State Bar of Texas felt pretty stupid. A Harris County jury deliberated little more than a half-hour before rejecting their arguments and evidence in the disbarment case against super plaintiff’s lawyer John O’Quinn and two associates. Deepening their humiliation, the pro bono State…
Night & Day
Thursday December 31 Not many comedians can include a handwritten thanks-for-the-laughs note from former president George Bush in their press kits, but Vic Henley is one of them. His rich brand of redneck comedy grows from plenty of Southern-good-ol’-boy experience: He grew up in Oxford, Alabama, graduated from Auburn University,…
The Reverend’s Resolutions
New Year’s Eve is a party dampened only by the perceived need to commit to a resolution that might actually survive a couple of weeks. But the Reverend Horton Heat, noted man of the cloth and foremost shouter of the gospel of psychobilly rock, has come up with a solution…
Follow the Yellow Brick Road
Among premillennial anxiety symptoms, clinging nostalgia rates high. The 1990s have proven a colorful and watery upchuck of the past three decades — a sentimental rendition of “Auld Lang Syne” in fashion, art, TV, dance and music. It should come as no surprise, then, that 1999 brings to Houston a…
Hot Plate
It would be cruel to claim that the guava empanadas ($1.25) at Cafe Miami (6114 Bissonnet, 772-3042) are one of the gooiest, most glorious desserts in town without explaining how to locate them: on the English-language side of the menu, look under “individual” items for “Cuban pies.” (Inexplicably, they aren’t…
Dish
Sure to Peas I’m told that black-eyed peas were imported into the South aboard African slave ships, originally intended for consumption by livestock; hence the nickname “cow peas.” Perhaps the same Reconstruction desperation that reduced Scarlett O’Hara to draperies forced Southerners to dine on animal fodder, but honor demanded they…
Urbana Renewal
Rarely have I had so much fun at a restaurant officially designated as a “scene.” Unlike its sometimes tragically hip cousins downtown, Urbana is a rollicking, often raucous feasting place for the Montrose tribes. Concrete floors, submarine-blue glass mosaics and stainless-steel trim contribute to the din, and the frisky soundtrack…
Jimmy “T-99” Nelson and Friends
One of the last of the great blues shouters, Jimmy “T-99” Nelson has been a Houston favorite since relocating here in 1955, just a few years after he scored national hits with the singles “T-99 Blues” and “Meet Me with Your Black Dress On.” Now in his seventies, the smiling…
Texas Music 1998: The Year That Wasn’t
Instead of taking a measured balance and declaring that ’98 was maybe the best of years, yet the worst of years, let’s cut to the chase — this year in Texas music was pretty much a stinker. That’s not to say it didn’t have its high points. But for all…
Too high. Period.
The phone is no friend of Curt Kirkwood’s. Too often, the tidings it bears are foul. He calls them “incomings from Tempe.” They go like this: Your brother’s wife overdosed this morning; She’s dead. Your brother got busted again last night, and he told the cops he was you. Your…