A Kinky Kind of Campaign?
First, there was Jesse Ventura in Minnesota. Then there was Ah-nuld in California. What’s next in the world of politainment? How about Kinky Friedman as governor of Texas? Though he hasn’t yet officially announced, the stogie-chomping Poe Elementary grad/country singer-songwriter/mystery writer/Texas Monthly humorist and self-professed “Gandhi-like spirit of the Utopia…
Final Straw
Approaching the entrance of the Rice University Art Gallery, one gets the impression of a steep cloud bank, or a heap of snow along the highway just after a plow has sheared the edge. Its surface is uneven, with portions swelling in different-sized bumps, featuring occasional hints of red and…
The Kants
Even if you find indie rock boring and annoying, the genre is more than palatable in the hands of locals the Kants. These rock philosophers play a ringing, melodic brand of the stuff that would fit nicely on Washington, D.C.’s Dischord label or with ’90s-era Touch & Go bands like…
Slipping into Darkness
Houston Police Department homicide investigators face a daunting task in sorting out the last hours in the life of 46-year-old municipal lobbyist Ross Allyn. Possible murder suspects range from the male hustlers-for-hire he occasionally took to his Timbergrove Manor rental house, to a circle of cocaine dealers he patronized for…
The Mavericks
It’s been five years since a new Mavericks disc graced the bins. The Miami band never broke up — instead they took a working sabbatical. Vocalist Raul Malo recorded a solo album, did some producing and appeared on Canto, the second Los Super Seven album, while bassist Robert Reynolds played…
A Bowl By Any Other Name
It was with great sadness that our city waved good-bye to the galleryfurniture.com Bowl, the glorious football game that annually brought together the finest college teams that couldn’t wrangle any other invitation. Sportswriters all over the country had great fun mocking the name of Mattress Mac’s extravaganza. But that might…
Oranges Band
There’s really not much that separates the Oranges Band from the hordes of indie-rock bands out there these days. But “not much” is not the same thing as “nothing,” and the Oranges Band does offer one intriguing angle. If you ever wondered what Spoon would sound like if they were…
Super Bowl Special
They were two hotties from Houston looking for a good time, and both were that rare combination of eager and pretty. One woman said she was looking for “Mr. Right, as well as Mr. Right Now!” The other claimed to be a look-alike of both Julianne Moore and Julia Roberts…
Octopus Project and Cue
To some, dance music is a constant repetition of boom-ch-boom-ch beats laid under some DJ’s crappy collection of dusty vinyl. For Austin/Houston group the Octopus Project, dance music is something else entirely, something they call “ambidextrous equipment failure junk-tronica.” The eight arms of the band’s four members — Toto Miranda…
Letters
Down-Bight Flattering Hooray for Gray: Loved this piece [“Houston, Once Removed,” by Josh Harkinson, November 20]. I’ve long thought Regimanuel Gray deserved more press coverage — I’ve been to Accra a couple of times and thought it really was the Houston of the Bight of Benin. I even met Mr…
Not the Sweetest Thing
Honey is one of those movies you will see (or not, whatever), swear you’ve seen before in several other guises and incarnations, then immediately forget you ever saw to begin with. Its story, about a would-be dancer trying to plot her escape from the mean streets (or mean movie sets…
Britannia Rules the Strand
10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, December 6 and 7. The Strand between 20th and 25th Streets, Galveston.
White Dork Down
In his career as a Hollywood action figure, Tom Cruise has been dressed in some pretty hip outfits — a macho fighter pilot’s sleek leather jacket, a NASCAR driver’s logo-speckled fire suit, assorted silken Armani sports jackets, even a black cape and fangs. So it’s a bit unsettling to see…
Hip-hop, Tejas
All my friends know the low rider / The low rider is a little higher / The low rider drives a little slower / Low rider, is a real goer. — War, “Low Rider” Inside the giant convention hall at Reliant Center, under a sickly amber-colored fluorescent light, lies an…
Mob Mentality
What can one lonely man do to fight the madness of the masses? This is the question posed by Eugene Ionesco’s wildly inventive Rhinoceros. Written in the ’50s, in the desolate wake of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s horrifying regimes, Ionesco’s absurd script imagines a world where every citizen — save one…
Haute Pocket
If a well-executed beef Wellington is the pinnacle of beef dishes, then the salmon en croûte ($16.95) at Massa’s (1160 Smith, 713-650-0837) may well be the summit of seafood dishes. A thick, juicy piece of salmon floating in a pink pool of creamy tarragon sauce is topped off with a…
Holiday Hit
The Alley Theatre’s production of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol makes for the best sort of holiday tradition. It’s short — clocking in at just under two hours with an intermission. It’s tender — even old Ebenezer can’t humbug at the Alley’s cherubic Tiny Tim (played on alternate nights by…
Cosmopolitan Confit
Rouge
Surprise Party
If The Nutcracker is a barometer for measuring the holiday spirit, it’s going to be a lively season. At Houston Ballet’s opening night, there was no way the audience could watch the clock during the first act or zone out during Act II’s dancing bonbons. The ballet’s vibrantly colored costumes…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, December 4 It’s not like the entire star-studded population of MTV’s TRL is swinging through town to make all the little girls weep with proto-lust and idol worship. But today’s Jingle Jam 2003 isn’t too far from the mark. The list of artists is fairly studded with stars and…
There’s a Doctor in Your House
Dr. Phillip C. McGraw’s daytime talk show, Dr. Phil, is fairly standard for a show in the Phil Donahue-Oprah Winfrey help-the-masses-through-individual-examples mold. The stage is plush, the guests are teary-eyed, and the studio audience is mostly female — and mostly overweight. But this season, Dr. Phil will take a departure…
My Life in Oils
THU 12/4 Artist David McGee is back in town with his first show in five years. Many of the paintings in “Tetelestai: Notebooks of the Black Sea” are autobiographical. The exhibition is named after Conrad Aiken’s poem “Tetelestai,” which tells the story of a man’s life, loves and regrets. The…
Mex It Up
Amalia Hernandez grew up in Mexico wanting to dance, but violins and pianos put her to sleep. So she looked for musical inspiration in the fields of her father’s farm, where she heard native musicians plucking tiny homemade guitars, requintos and harps — the instruments that led her to try…
Duck and Cover
FRI 12/5 They say that blood bounces on ice. Who “they” are and how they know this might have to do with a crowbar, a gambling debt and the woods outside Chicago. Or maybe they grew up living and breathing (and bleeding) ice hockey. With the growth of the sport…
Baring Fangs
Rock and roll is the emu oil of 2003. Its supply so far exceeds its demand that record companies are starting to look like the befuddled ranchers of the mid-’90s who were forced to free their stocks of giant flightless birds all over the Hill Country when the beasts’ commercial…
Let Go
SAT 12/6 LEGOs are timeless. Whether kids are building castles or space stations (or just sticking the pieces up their noses), the colorful connectables have been key building blocks for fostering imagination and conceptual thinking for generations of little tykes. Perhaps their only downfall is that they hurt so darn…
Spoken Like a Champion
For the average person, “spoken word” is not a good thing. It evokes images of people with mikes, flannel shirts, strident voices and issues with their parents (or parent-substitute, the government). No thanks. Spoken word was pitched as a trend, hyped as poetry-meets-rock and roll. Suddenly, every coffeehouse had an…
On the Freedom Tip
WED 12/7 If anything can shake up Houston’s somewhat staid jazz scene, it’s an appearance by New York tenor saxophonist and leading free-jazz advocate Sabir Mateen and his quintet.The quintet includes trumpet player Raphe Malik, whose own forays into free jazz drew acclaim as far back as the ’70s. Back…