Moon Men
Dean Wareham, reluctant leader of the band Luna, prefers to work in lyrical fragments instead of straightforward stories. It helps, then, that his pieces tend to be more interesting than whatever tale he’s trying to tell at the time. Granted, lyrical bits such as “You’re out all night chasing girlies…
Saints and the Surreal
Virgil Thomson’s opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, is a very strange work, to say the least. First of all, it has no story line in the traditional sense. It can most accurately be described as a series of tableaux. Moreover, the words of the opera don’t make a great…
Sterling Siblings
It’s almost a foregone conclusion that Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra would be two of the crown jewels of Alley artistic director Gregory Boyd’s seven-year reign. With Corin Redgrave in the title role of the former and Vanessa Redgrave as Cleopatra in the latter, how could the productions be…
The Insider
It’s the Private Schools, Mayor We normally don’t critique what appears on the Chronicle’s op-ed page, but several readers directed our attention to last week’s Sounding Board column by editorial board member David Langworthy (headlined “Life in White-bread land is not so bad”), in which Langworthy offered a woeful personal…
In the Rough
As the city’s effort to give away its municipal golf courses to a private operator blows up, the Lanier administration and City Council are ducking for cover, leaving three employees of the Parks and Recreation Department caught in the fallout. Over the last 12 months, the parks department has accumulated…
Make It Ugly, By All Means
Hardly a word was raised in protest when the Southwest Freeway was first routed through some of the city’s finest and oldest inner-city neighborhoods in 1959. That’s how it was back then: Houston was on the move, and the Texas highway department, urged on by politically connected developers, was virtually…
Letters
Year-Round Love Brian Wallstin’s article on the Cy-Fair year-round question [News, “The Year-Round Go-Round,”January 11] exposes Charlotte Lampe as a headline grabber who quotes inaccurate data and professes half-truths to push her position onto the public. The article also quotes Ron Kennedy, president of the Cy-Fair school board, saying that…
Press Picks
thursday february 1 Hare Attitudes One of the great things about art is that, in the hands of a thoughtful and skilled artist, anything can be a provocative topic. If you doubt that assertion, you need look no further than Nayland Blake’s current show at the CAM, which uses the…
Poor Boy Riches
There are restaurants in this city that deserve praise for the expertise with which a chef prepares a classic dish; there are restaurants that earn accolades for the kitchen’s imaginative use of ingredients. There are restaurants that attract their customers with a sophisticated decor, and, likewise, there are restaurants that…
Bo Knows
Seeing that adaptability is frequently the cornerstone to survival, it’s easy to accept the notion that Bo Diddley is one highly adapted performer. Popular music has changed immeasurably in the years between Ellas McDaniel’s (a.k.a. Diddley) first Chicago gigs with the Langley Ave. Jive Cats and the cocky utterance, “Bo,…
Battle Scars
There’s no need to impress upon Cypress Hill’s Louis Freese that the Devil loves to frolic in the City of Angels. More than once around Los Angeles, Freese has caught Satan’s hellish gaze and lived to tell about it. Freese — known to his fans as nasal-voiced rapper B Real…
Rotation
Tori Amos Boys for Pele Atlantic “Musically, I always allow myself to jump off of cliffs,” Tori Amos muses in the liner notes to her new CD. “To me, this album sounds like the biggest cliff yet.” Maybe so. But the next time Amos decides to take a plunge as…
Static
Plugging in to Rod… Like Eric Clapton and a few other graying rockers, Rod Stewart has found occupational rejuvenation and renewed respect thanks, in part, to MTV’s once-irrepressible “unplugged” phenomenon. Stewart’s 1993 release, Unplugged … and Seated, was a humble (for Stewart) forward-into-the-past affair that sold five million copies. Last…
Crippled Inside
In Richard Loncraine’s audacious and hugely entertaining version of Richard III, the “poisonous hunchbacked toad” of William Shakespeare’s historical drama becomes a Machiavellian fascist on the rise. Even more likely to rattle purists than Oliver Parker’s recent adaptation of Othello, Loncraine’s film, inspired by an acclaimed stage production directed by…
Afternoon Delight
Carlos Martinez has never met Lupita, a young Mexican woman who’s just called him up in distress. You wouldn’t know it, though, to hear their conversation. Lupita thinks she’s pregnant, and Martinez is clucking sympathetically from his studio at KLAT radio, 1010 on the AM dial, in northwest Houston. In…
Tell Them the Dog Did It!
You remember the Tracker — the portable device touted by the South Carolina-based Quadro Corporation as a technological marvel that would give law enforcement and other authorities the ability to unerringly hone in on all sorts of concealed contraband. Among the near-miraculous ends for which the Tracker purportedly could be…