Let’s Do Diner
Ever since they first appeared in 1872 as horse-drawn wagons selling nickel sandwiches at night after other restaurants had closed, diners have earned a deserved place in American culinary history. So successful did these wagons become that the horses were retired and the wagons set up as permanent, 24-hour eateries…
Static
Best intentions… Jake Van Mater is a man with a mission. It’s just that, at the moment, he’s not exactly sure what that mission is. Aside from being the brains behind the Houston rock trio Black Spot, Van Mater is a do-gooder with grand intentions. Supply this singer/guitarist enough cough…
Still King
In the sleepy Mississippi Delta towns of Indianola and Itta Bena, near where the blues was born, the cafes serve a regional specialty called a floating cheeseburger. It seems like a simple thing — just a cheeseburger buried in a bowl of chili — but once you’ve had one, you…
Odd Man Out
Van Dyke Parks does not talk. He speaks, pronounces, proclaims, mumbles and grumbles, chuckles and chortles. But he does not simply talk to waste his words; every syllable has meaning, every breath great implication, every silence great weight. Wearing a red-and-blue striped polo shirt and penny loafers (with pennies in…
Truth in Advertising
“I never actually stuck anything up my ass,” Byron Dean says. “I would just squeeze it a little bit in my cheeks.” At the moment, Dean, lead singer for Houston’s Poor Dumb Bastards, is addressing a rather intimate question regarding the beer bottle that, among habitues of the band’s live…
Rotation
Tony Bennett On Holiday: A Tribute to Billie Holiday Columbia Tony Bennett has nearly always been an anachronism. His career began just as his brand of sophisticated, Tin Pan Alley melody was about to be swallowed up by the passionate rhythms of rock and roll; a half-century later, with all…
A Deep Cut
Billy Bob Thornton’s richly observed Sling Blade opens with a prologue that can only be described as its own small film, a laconically eerie sequence that, as the rest of Sling Blade unfolds, begins to take hold in the memory like a particularly dense nightmare. As Daniel Lanois’s quietly atmospheric…
Life and Darth
Irvin Kershner’s The Empire Strikes Back, the continuation of George Lucas’s Star Wars, is a classic in its own right, one I vastly prefer to the first film. Its textures are richer, its emotions deeper, and it’s an honest-to-Jedi movie rather than a dozen jammed-together episodes of a serial. On…
Female Trouble
While theater has a long history of investigating father-son relationships (from Shakespeare’s King Henry and Prince Hal to Arthur Miller’s Willy and Biff Loman), stories of mothers and daughters have often been relegated to supporting, or even absent, plot lines. The reason why theater has embraced plays about male family…
O No, Mr. Lennon
“Yoko Ono Presents One of the Biggest Art and Media Events Taking Place in the Houston Area This Winter” trumpets the full-color press release. The artwork that the One and Ono will “unveil” — never mind that she won’t be in attendance — on February 21 at the Renaissance Houston…
Sportin’ Life
It seems as if it were only a few months ago that Harris County voters were being sold this wonderful deal that would accommodate Drayton McLane with a new baseball stadium and keep the Astros in town. You may recall being told how this arrangement wouldn’t cost you too many…
The Insider
Judicial Restraint The revelation that a lowly assistant in District Clerk Charles Bacarisse’s office rerouted cases to courts where they might get a favorable hearing has had Harris County’s civil district judges at odds. The tension finally erupted last week in a round of exclamatory judicial e-mail and a heated…
Letters
It Could Happen Two problems will face Houston Renaissance as it marshals support for its Fourth Ward project [“The Great Land Grab,” by Brian Wallstin, January 30]. One will be the acquisition of enough contiguous land so that the residents can be isolated from activities that are incompatible with residential…
Press Picks
thursday february 20 Luxurious Consumption Once upon a time, people made a social exercise out of drinking tea. Hence, they needed tea-drinking stuff: porcelains, silver, even furniture made for the occasion. Twice tonight, architectural historian John R. Tschirch explains tea’s effect on the decorative arts. 6 and 8 p.m. Museum…
What’s Driving Miss Shelia?
Only five days into her first term as a member of Congress, Sheila Jackson Lee hurried into her small office in the Longworth Building. Back home, while serving on the Houston City Council, Lee had forged a reputation as a brusque and imperious boss, and her short time in Washington…