Houstonpalooza
Just when you thought the suffix “palooza” had been more overexposed than Gwen Stefani’s navel, here comes what organizers hope will be an inaugural Houston event. Nevertheless, the showcase for a number of local Buzz-friendly bands is certainly something that should happen with more than annual frequency. Jive Records’ Bowling…
Gas Man
He hates the gas station. That is the first thing that must be understood. It is not merely a nuisance, or a minor annoyance. To use those words would be to smooth over the raging injustice that has infected every day of David Rosenfield’s life for the past 14 years,…
Faceplant
They’ve been compared to Limp Bizkit, Red Hot Chili Peppers and 311, but Pasadena’s own Faceplant have a bag of their own that flexes rap, rock and funk like steroid-fed high school seniors on the varsity football team. Vocalists Bryan Broussard and Billy Hargrove trade off verses with a quickness…
Tribal Warfare
When she moved to Houston 20 years ago, Carroll Cocchia says, she couldn’t find any other American Indians. “They were invisible.” Two years ago, encouraged by Dick Huebner, executive director of the Houston Minority Business Council, she started the Native American Chamber of Commerce. She would bring Indians together, helping…
Damned Amusing
Those possessing a vampire’s keen senses may see through the goth grunge of The Queen of the Damned to a deeper ideological conflict lurking beneath. On one side there’s novelist Anne Rice, sweepingly sensuous and profoundly humorless, who welcomed the cannibalization of her second and third bloodsucker books to create…
Freddy’s Nightmare
One Friday last month, sometime between the breakfast tacos and the lunch meat, Nadir Foteh received a telephone call from his landlord. Foteh runs Freddy’s Deli, a small family-owned cafe on the ground floor of the 1800 West Loop South office building near San Felipe. Freddy’s has been feeding tenants…
Snoozie Q
Following his dazzling change-of-pace performance in Training Day, Denzel Washington returns to more familiar turf in another of his trademark roles as One of the Best Human Beings in the World in John Q. The opening scenes establish quickly (and a bit heavy-handedly) that John Q. Archibald is the finest…
Hounding Hardeway
Winnie Gaynor, a 69-year-old widow, lives alone in Studewood Heights northwest of downtown. It’s a low-income, mostly African-American neighborhood where older homeowners coexist unwillingly with drug dealers and other perpetrators of street crime. Residents do not open their doors willingly to unexpected strangers, particularly those approaching after nightfall. On a…
Flunk You
“Pray for us.” So ends a note Judd Apatow sent out last week to television critics who have been supportive of his series Undeclared, among the few half-hour comedies to debut last fall with any modicum of acclaim and expectation. Set at a northern California university and populated by awkward…
The Line of Fire
Let none of the brave reporters here in town following Enron ever think themselves accurs’d or hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks who covers Kandahar. While those Afghan war scribes are facing trigger-happy nomads in a lawless land, in Houston journalists are ducking from eggs tossed by the city’s…
Dead on Arrival
The mysteries of death, with all its creepy accoutrements, can be weirdly fascinating — even the stuff of some wonderfully bizarre theater. Take last year’s Stiff…undertaking Undertaking at Theater LaB Houston. With its silly, maudlin characters and its slapstick clowning that involved such things as a grave-making contest and a…
Lay Down
Lay Down Welfare CEOs: “Up In Smoke” [by Brian Wallstin and Tim Fleck, February 7], while well researched and informative for the most part, is quite incorrect when it refers to Enron’s board of directors as “free marketeers.” Some Enron executives may have posed as free market trailblazers, but “corporate…
Dead Cats
Rachel Hecker is “Sad and Pissed.” And don’t you fucking forget it. Hecker’s gallery had suggested that “Sad and Mad” — albeit a bit like Dr. Seuss — might be a less incendiary choice for her show’s title. Hecker resisted. Even in our expletive-filled society, profanity still retains an edge…
Of Nuns and Nazis
If a musical struck critics as a bit sickly sweet in 1965, you can imagine the reaction it would get today. Add that kind of saccharine to the age of cynicism, and you get only the most successful audience-participation phenom since The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the “Sing-A-Long Sound of…
French for Beginners
Our entrées are finished, and I still have a little wine left. We’re drinking a bottle of Paul Jaboulet’s Crozes Hermitage, a sturdy red wine from the Northern Rhône. It’s one of the very few interesting choices on the short wine list at Le Mistral, the new strip-center French restaurant…
Pinch One-Liner
Here is just a smattering of stats on Casey Stengel: born 1890, died 1975; former major-league baseball player; Hall of Fame manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Boston Braves, New York Yankees and New York Mets; and the only manager to win five consecutive World Series (Yankees 1949-1953). But what most…
Hemingway’s Favorite Libation
Bossa (610 Main Street, 713-223-2622) oozes sensuality. Even the bar is long and curvaceous, softly lit with candles and a pastel mural of a distant land. With wooden shutters, transparent curtains, leafy ferns and slow-moving ceiling fans, it’s the kind of place where you half expect Humphrey Bogart to step…
The Stuff of Dreams
Like a well-made bed where layers of soft, comfy sheets are topped with the perfectly weighted blanket, the shrimp enchiladas ($5.95) at Ostioneria Arandas Seafood (5757 Bissonnet, 713-663-5522) alternate in texture and flavor without being too heavy. The cheese rests on the corn tortillas and the tortillas wrap around the…
It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane…
Last year Brian McKnight pulled off an amazing feat: He released an album that didn’t have one track produced by the Neptunes. While the Virginia boys’ patented ghetto-sleazy beats thumped on the albums of everyone from Britney Spears to P. Diddy to Alana Davis, McKnight’s Superhero is a Neptunes-free zone…
Bipolar Bop
Within seconds of your meeting Blue October’s singer-songwriter-guitarist Justin Furstenfeld, he acts as if he’s known you forever. Anyone familiar with his music will tell you he’s an open book, or as some, including Furstenfeld, would say: an open wound. At Cafe Brasil over granitas (“liquid crack rock,” Furstenfeld calls…
Annus Horribilis
The year 2001 was a very bad one. There was September 11. There was the great apocalyptic ArmagedEnron Meltdown. There was Andrea Yates. There was the Fat City tag, the UH Cougars’ first winless football season, and just a whole bunch of other crap. Queen Elizabeth II of England recently…
Home Is Where the House Is
A young woman — blond, perky and slightly inebriated — walks over to the DJ. She flirtatiously asks the spinner if he can play Sade’s “King of Sorrow.” “I’d kill to hear that one — please, please, please!” she purrs. The DJ tells her that he may not have the…
Sevendust
Maybe the lads from Sevendust can jet to L.A. after the band’s show in Houston to put in an appearance at the Concert for Artists’ Rights on February 26. That’s where the Dixie Chicks and other big stars will tell the paying customers about how they get shafted by the…
Kellye Gray
It’s been a long time — 14 years, in fact — since Kellye Gray spent her nights singing at the Blue Moon. Back then the club was the “other” jazz joint in town, and Gray, who had tried her hand at both folk singing and stand-up comedy, was the new…