Married to Poetry
“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion,” we hear T.S. Eliot lecture a room full of admirers in Tom and Viv, “but an escape from emotion.” We don’t hear what Eliot said next, but it’s as if we did: “[Poetry] is not the expression of personality, but an escape…
Audience Reaction
It’s time for “Punitive Damages,” everyone’s favorite segment of the game show Payback Time, where scumbags get what’s coming to them. Today’s scumbag is one Diane Wyatt, a college dean who’s sexually harassed one of her students. Presented with three categories of “paybacks,” the student looks to the audience for…
The Brady Bomb
For those of us on the evolutionary ladder between the Baby Boomers and the Gen X-ers, The Brady Bunch had a purpose. When the Bunch first aired, 1969-1974, we’d come home from school each afternoon, latch keys on grimy shoe strings around our necks, dreading what awaited us. The first…
Sold!
Just west of the Galleria, where all the merchandise is new and the prices are fixed in computers, shoppers can enter an altogether different world at a store called Texas Rich and Famous. On a recent winter Saturday, a dozen or so bargain hunters were seated on folding chairs waiting…
Gunning for Greanias
The saga of Bayou City Enterprises should pose a simple, open-and-shut question: Did the firm actually do any work for the more than $400,000 in taxpayers’ money it has received since it was named as a minority subcontractor on a ticket-collection contract in 1993? After a two-month audit of Bayou…
Heaven Sent?
Before you rent a Seeing Eye dog to cope with Houston Post gossip columnist Betsy Parish’s ubiquitous blind items, let us provide a significantly enhanced version of a mysterious paragraph that appeared in her February 17 offering. Parish wrote cheekily of an unidentified board of directors of an unnamed institution…
The Czar’s Return
Mayor Lee P. Brown? It has a nice ring — at least to Lee P. Brown. The former Houston police chief and current drug czar in the Clinton administration has been quietly sounding out his prospects for a return to the city and a possible run for mayor in the…
Letters
Pay the Police The timing of “Killer Behind the Badge” [By Steve McVicker, January 12] could not have been more disturbing. In the case of the HPD officer who murdered his two children, however, at least the daily newspapers did not leave out salient facts such as that a neighbor…
Press Picks
thursday february 23 The Persistence of Hate in the 21st Century Despite having endured the Holocaust, Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel doesn’t consider hate part and parcel of the human experience. His optimistic view is that hate has many faces, and until people learn to recognize and battle it…
Something Old, Something New
They’re both new. They both traffic in the now-mandatory fish tacos. They both add fashionable grilled vegetables to the south-of-the-border standards so dear to Houstonians’ hearts and minds. But otherwise, Cabo and El Palacio seem to exist in parallel universes: Cabo’s in the sharp, smartly packaged world of an urbane…
Live Shots
Kicking Giant Rice Coffee House Monday, February 13 Kicking Giant’s latest album, Alien I.D., is surprising, not so much for the music but for the fact that it’s on K records, the Olympia, Washington, label that’s defined the naive-pop sound in alternative music. There’s nothing naive here. Kicking Giant alternates…
Keeping His Cool
The Jesus of Cool is back. Not that he was really gone — it’s not like he died or anything like that — but Nick Lowe is fresh from a trip through Little Village and on tour for the first time in five years to promote a new solo album,…
Pond Rising
One day about three years ago, in the slack mist of Portland, Oregon, I trudged down to the river to watch local bands play a festival called the Mayor’s Ball (Portland at the time had a pretty cool mayor). One of the more memorable of several memorable bands was called…
Tall Tales
Dream state number one: you’re 92, have had a stroke, and travel back in time to converse with your former selves. Dream state number two: you’re 26 and are visited by your future selves, who can tell you how your life is going to unfold. Dream quandary: suppose your younger…
Poetic Justice
The poet Vassar Miller, we’re happy to report, is alive and well and the subject of two tributes this week. Miller was profiled in a story in the November 17 Press, “Life of a Poet,” which detailed the circumstances that had led the esteemed 70-year-old author to the brink of…
Climbing New Heights
Fledgling theater companies are nothing new in Houston, a town still struggling to establish a third Equity house. Dead theater companies are nothing new either. Many of the companies launched with great to-do in the last few years are now either defunct or in seeming suspended animation: whither Houston Repertory…
Sound Check
The way I see it — today, anyhow — is that this modern rock thing I keep hearing about on the radio can be viewed as a three-headed monster. Now before you point out the obvious and scream that you can’t categorize an artist’s soul that way, just sit down…
Art on the Borderline
Who are we? Where are we? There are plenty of reasons to wonder, especially since the reference points we usually rely upon to situate ourselves are so easily mistaken for others that may lead us astray. What happens when we step outside our usual environments, only to find that we…