Parading Poodles
SUN 2/22 The four-legged members of your family deserve a chance to get in on the Mardi Gras action, too. This weekend pet owners will coax their animal companions into costume, then persuade those canines — plus a few cats, birds, potbellied pigs and horses — to trot along (with…
Long Overdue
Through February 21 at Main Street Theater, 4617 Montrose, 713-524-6706. $20-$30.
Belly of the Beat
Miles Copeland is a big shot. Considering he’s the man who managed the Police, Sting and the Bangles, it’s safe to say he knows what the public wants. So when he told us he expects his newest project, the Bellydance Superstars, to be the next Riverdance, we just didn’t have…
The New Art
When it comes to arts and crafts, the latter half of the duo gets a bad rap. Art is lofty, we seem to think, while craft is lowly. Anyone can knit a macramé doily, but it takes a skilled artist to paint the beginning of humankind on the roof of…
Get Stupid
Contemporary art is often overanalyzed. Critics write thousands of words trying to interpret or just understand what may be intended simply as nonsense or even stupidity. The 35-year-old performance artist Claude Wampler has seen her share of critical overanalysis — writers putting the proverbial finger on what makes her pieces…
The Family Guy
There have been copious books written about architect Louis I. Kahn, whose monumental creations were like ancient Roman buildings transplanted into some near-distant future. His structures, among them the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, made him among the most…
Terrible Ciao
Brie pizza $8.95
Red snapper $21.95
Spaghetti and meatballs $11.95
Linguine puttanesca $8.95
Chicken romano $10.95
Cannelloni $11.95
Rites of Spring
It is so very nice when a movie completely outstrips the expectations conjured by its trailer, as is the case with The Dreamers. At first blush, this tale of three passionate youths caught up in the late-’60s Parisian countercultural revolution looked downright trite. Never mind that esteemed veteran director Bernardo…
Somebody’s Gonna Feel This
I’ve just gotten off the phone with my new friend, Glenn. He’s the publicity director for Atlantic Records — my pipeline to Kid Rock. He wants to know if the promo materials he sent got to me and when my deadline is. They have, and it’s in a week. “I’d…
Fab Film
Albert Maysles, with brother David, made two different films about two different rock-and-roll bands five years apart, but to this day he can’t think of one without immediately thinking of the other. The first he was shooting 40 years ago this very day, more or less: The Beatles were on…
Night of the Living Dead
One of the greatest injustices of 1960s rock history is that the Zombies aren’t mentioned in the same breath as the other top British Invasion bands. Best known for three U.S. hits (“She’s Not There,” “Tell Her No” and “Time of the Season”), they nonetheless produced a stellar body of…
Passport to Nowhere
In a gritty arena in southwest Houston, Aaron Navarro, a trainer with tattoos crawling up his neck, scoops out several hunks of petroleum jelly from a jar and slathers it across Benjamin Flores’s taut 126-pound frame. A coach, two trainers and a few friends shuffle in and out of Benjamin’s…
Endless Summer
It’s no great revelation — music is indelibly stamped by the environment in which it was created. With most radio pop, the lack of environment creates a vacancy of soul at its core: The lights are on, but nobody’s home. Santa Cruz native Miguel Migs comes from the same state…
Race for the House
Members of the U.S. House of Representatives don’t come much whiter than Houston’s Chris Bell. Raised in Dallas’s tony Highland Park, he was the kind of University of Texas frat boy who ends up as president of the interfraternity council. His census form officially lists his ethnicity as “Really Earnest…
Ronald Reagan’s Army
Austin’s Yuppie Prick$ exist beyond the parameters of the never-ending “What is punk?” debate. Completely. While their music undoubtedly has much in common with the Buzzcocks and the Sex Pistols, their backgrounds and lyrics do not. Not for them the dead-end jobs as butcher’s assistants or fish-and-chips counter help, nor…
The Freedom Fighter?
Everyone at the constable’s debate is talking about drugs. How to rid Precinct 7 of drugs. How to tear down drug houses. How to keep the kids off drugs. Nobody is talking about the fact that one of the candidates on stage has been convicted of participating in a major…
The Proclaimers
Compared to their Celtic cousins in Ireland, there are relatively few rock bands that sound recognizably Scottish. Big Country comes to mind, but that group seemed gimmick-driven — Stuart Adamson decked himself out in plaid and made his guitar sound like bagpipes, but he sang in that generic universal accent,…
Increased Clout
Benjamin Flores stands at the nexus of two trends — at one end, he is the symbol of a born-again Houston boxing scene and, at the other, he is riding the exploding popularity of boxing among Hispanics as a whole. Kenny Weldon, Holyfield’s trainer who grew up in Galena Park,…
Kanye West
This has been touted as the year’s most anticipated release — less because of what Kanye West has achieved as half of Roc-A-Fella’s hitmaking house production team, and more because of what he represents: The long-awaited bridge between hip-hop’s over- and underground, he’s a guy who admits that he wants…
Letters
Gnome Grown Waldorf wonders: I was so saddened to hear the writer portray Waldorf as if it were a cult [“School Spirit(s),” by Michael Serazio, February 5]. I am very intelligent and have searched high and low for the best educational system for my four-year-old child. I live in the…
Tego Calderón
With his supersized Afro, just-woke-up-after-a-late-night voice, and I-can’t-believe-I’m-a-star humility, Tego Calderón might be the most lovable thug of all time. Certainly, he’s the most loved rapper in reggaetón. The kid who was such a pest that he gets his nickname from the pesky abayarde ant (“fire ants,” we call ’em…
Idols in Training
“Before we start the conversation, how do you feel about pageants and children?” asks Wanda Barham, the organizer of the Junior Miss Texas Rodeo Pageant. Damn. She really knows how to take the bull by the horns. “The downside of pageants is sometimes we have stage moms and that kind…
Lost Trailers
Stokes Nielson, founder of Georgia’s Lost Trailers, is unmistakably Southern. He tells stories in his songs, and if you’re not careful, he might call you sir. The 28-year-old singer-songwriter, who’s calling from inside the international terminal at JFK airport, is also a romantic. He’s headed to London to surprise his…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, February 19 When we visit the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, it’s usually to see one of the glorious masterworks hanging inside. But what about the buildings themselves? The MFAH is giving props to the architects who designed its art environs during today’s drop-in tour. “When the first building…
Loretta Lynn
While an unsettlingly large number of Barbie-fied female country singers today study hard to manufacture grit and twang, Loretta Lynn came about hers genuinely. The 69-year-old Lynn was born dirt-poor in the backwoods of Kentucky, married at 13 and was the mother of four by 17. She began singing professionally…
The President’s Excellent Adventure
I always have this feeling that there must be another world in which there is a different rhythm operating, and I just put things together and keep changing the way all the things onstage relate to each other, until it seems to evoke for me the weirdness of that other…
Steve Forbert
If ’70s rock journalists threw Steve Forbert onto the “next Dylan” pile along with Springsteen and Prine and Elliott Murphy and Willie Nile, they should now be granted clemency. There was, of course, some reason. Forbert, like Dylan, left the hinterlands for New York City, with a guitar in hand,…
Beastie Boys
SUN 2/22 Seen that commercial where a dude runs with a pack of wolves and fetches a stick? The ad guys are reaching pretty far back with that one. Back in ancient times — especially during the Greek empire — the notion of man wrestling the beast within was explored…
Chicken Lickin’ Good
The cartoon chicken, the primary colors on the walls, the menu printed in English and Spanish, the smell of that amazing fried chicken. It can only mean one thing: Pollo Campero has opened a new location (2410 South Wayside Drive, 713-926-4790). There are now three of the Guatemalan fast-food fried…
Athletes, Schmathletes
FRI 2/20 In one episode of WKRP in Cincinnati, radio DJs Venus Flytrap and Johnny Fever drink shots of booze on-air to show how alcohol affects coordination, judgment and reaction time. Venus reacts as you’d expect, getting falling-down drunk. But the more Johnny drinks, the quicker he becomes. It’s as…