Letters
Hotel Dud Following your story [“Hotel Hell,” by Brian Wallstin, January 18], we discover that Wayne Duddlesten will get the contract to build the convention center hotel. And the taxpayers are roped into helping make good on a private venture. Councilman Rob Todd was the main opponent to this deal…
Cheese Whiz
It would be hard to find a better metaphor for the last decade of Lower Westheimer — a regrettable decline followed by a revitalizing and funky renaissance — than the venerable Pot Pie Pizzeria. It’s been nearly a decade since the changing realities of Montrose ended the Pot Pie of…
State-of-the-Art Ghouls
In its own special way, White Zombie is the perfect state-of-the-art rock band for the ’90s, priding itself on its ability to fit in anywhere, penetrate any scene, appeal to any crowd. Made up of three scrungy guys and one sex-symbol-by-default girl, the group is harder than Slayer, faster than…
Rotation
Gin Blossoms Congratulations I’m Sorry A&M The Gin Blossoms lost more than they realized when founding guitarist Doug Hopkins put a gun to his head in 1993, ending his troubled life just months before the Tempe, Arizona group’s debut, New Miserable Experience, exploded. At that point, Hopkins had already been…
Static
Playing Possum… Like any great band, Possum Dixon sounds like something, but damned if you can place it. With a chilly anti-image just rock and roll enough to keep part of their audience somewhat at ease, and just odd enough to keep another part more on their toes, the Los…
Woo? Wow!
Given the current state of high-tech trickery available to filmmakers, just about any director with an adequate budget can give you maximum bang for your box-office buck. Add a first-rate stunt coordinator to the mix, and even something as silly as Fair Game can seem at least sporadically exciting. So…
Devilish Boys
For such a brazen bunch of foul-mouthed antiheroes, the Supersuckers are certainly capable of groveling with the best of them when it comes time to face a true icon. “We’ve worshipped that man for a long time,” says the Supersuckers’ Dancing Eagle (birth name: Dan Seigal), still slightly awestruck over…
Zoot Me Up!
In a cramped pocket of a shop on the Eastex Freeway recently, Joe Coleman, co-owner of Coleman’s Men’s Wear, stepped back to watch a suit turn a regular man into a prince. “It’s something else, huh?” said Coleman’s client, a portly fellow named Ricardo Tijerina, modeling from the shop’s tiny…
Press Picks
thursday february 15 A Tribute to El Vaquero and El Ranchero Casa Ramirez presents its annual rodeo show — photographs celebrating the dusty history of vaqueros who roped and rode and wrangled and gave us the word rodeo. These original cowboys from Mexico and Spanish Texas also gave us the…
Dutch Treat
When, in 1988, the musicians of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra voted to ask Italian Riccardo Chailly to become the first non-Dutch conductor in the Netherlands orchestra’s then-100-year history, they thought they knew what they were getting. The Concertgebouw (named for the famed concert hall it occupies) had long been one…
A Ride to Remember
A recent revival of Carousel, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s classic but problematic musical about Billy Bigelow, a strapping young barker for a small-time carousel, and Julie Jordan, his fatefully faithful teen love, was so dynamic that it won not only a handful of Olivier Awards but also a bunch of Tonys…
Skin Deep
Metaphors are useful in art as well as writing, and if you were looking for a metaphor to explain just what’s right — and also, unfortunately, just what’s wrong — with DiverseWorks’ latest show, “Skin Speak: the First Survey of Houston Tattoo,” you had to look no further than the…
Film Culture
Mohammed Kamara remembers vividly the first time he saw a movie. He was a teenager living in Liberia, and a Land Rover bearing representatives of the Red Cross and the World Health Organization came into his West African village. With them was a cargo of 16 millimeter films and a…
Smoke and Mirrors (and more smoke)
Tim Hogan tugs at the curled brim of his camouflage cap, his hands remarkably grime-free for a mechanic who runs a busy auto-repair shop. But it’s early yet, and along with his father and other employees of AH&H Enterprises, Hogan will eventually blacken his mitts under a hood. Hogan’s not…
The Insider
If It Were Up to the Jury … State District Judge Carolyn Garcia and medical malpractice specialist Caroline Baker had the opportunity to get to know each other much better last November when Garcia presided over the trial of a lawsuit in which Baker represented the defendant hospital. Now Baker…
Reverse Sting
The regular January meeting of the local MENSA chapter was over, but some members of the high-IQ society stuck around at the Rock Bottom Brewery to chat up the evening’s guest speaker, FBI agent Rolando Moss. One couple seemed especially interested in hearing more from the agent about his line…
Political Futbol
Make no mistake about it,” wrote Doc Lawson, the director of the Houston Metropolitan Area Youth Soccer League, in a January 10 memo to his staff. “We are in a war and what is at stake is nothing less than our children’s futures. I am fighting to recruit as many…