Wine Geek Chic
Sideways, the sleeper hit movie about love among California wine geeks, seems to be changing America’s taste in wine. Nominated for five Oscars including Best Picture, Best Direction and Best Adapted Screenplay, the film has sent sales of Pinot Noir wines soaring. Set in the Santa Ynez Valley, an area…
Letters
Surfing the Airwaves Radio-revised country music: Thank you, thank you, thank you for “Radio Daze”. You said it all, about all of those stations. I only would have beat the Country Legends horse a bit more than you did. It irks me to no end that they’ve turned one-hit and…
Sharp-Dressed Men
“You’re like a prima ballerina on a spring afternoon” — New York Dolls, “Personality Crisis,” 1973 “We spies, oh yeah, we slow hands” — Interpol, “Slow Hands,” 2004 It’s been a strange couple of years for Interpol, years in which the natty NY scenesters have witnessed their audience’s exponential growth…
Ill Will
Like many leukemia patients, Jacob Norris is a virtual prisoner in his own home. The 41-year-old Spring man is on 24-hour call for the phone message that might save his life: that a donor has been found for a bone marrow transplant, the only cure. If that call comes, he…
Ultra Man
They came, they spun, they all kicked ass, but in the end, there could be only one winner of the Houston Press/South Beach Ultra DJ spin-off, and that was Andy Champa Moore. Let’s review the basics: Over the past few weeks, we asked Houston’s house DJ community to send in…
The Dead Zone
He called them “the little houses.” They were the shotgun shacks and decomposing Victorians, the flophouses where the panhandlers crashed and the drug dealers weighed rock. Along the crabgrass yards of the Fourth Ward slum, they bred the kind of crime and poverty unheard of in Rich Agnew’s Clear Lake…
The Black Godfather
“Andre Williams makes Little Richard look like Pat Boone.” — Lux Interior of the Cramps “Andre Williams? If he’s still around, he’s probably doing time.” — Keith Richards Nobody in the last 50 years has worn more hats — pimped-out Stetsons all — than Andre Williams, a.k.a. the Black Godfather,…
Fit for Japanese Royalty
Yeah, we too were nervous eating raw fish at a place whose name conjures Burger King. But the just-opened Sushi King (3401 Kirby Drive, 713-528-8998) is a wonderful Japanese eatery. Husband-and-wife owners Keeper and Christine Lin, who are also responsible for Kaneyama on Westheimer, have teamed up with executive chef…
Last Night at the Alamo
Imagine you’re a music-industry insider at one of the many Grammy post-parties. You’re in a hoity-toity Beverly Hills hotel ballroom, and P. Diddy has just handed you a flute of Cristal. You’ve just eaten some Wolfgang Puck creation while chatting to Big Boi of OutKast, and now you’re dancing cheek…
No Fun Allowed
No city knows how to throw a parade better than Houston. New Orleans and New York are dilettantes when compared to us. Those towns go for the big brutish spectacle of thousands of spectators having noisy fun; here in Houston we favor the chamber-music form of parade: a few scattered…
Playbill
Ska Is Dead II, with Voodoo Glow Skulls, MU330 and Streetlight Manifesto In 1998, Toasters singer Bucket Hingley said that “the people who are telling me ska is dead never knew it was alive.” Cute quote, but ska faces bigger problems now. Today’s radio listeners don’t even know ska well…
Purchase Orders
Few politicians have met Bob Perry. The last time he was directly involved in a campaign was nearly 30 years ago. Yet Perry is one of the most politically active businessmen in America. During the 2004 election season, Perry and his wife gave at least $8.2 million to national Republican…
Rotation
The End of Love spinART PREfection Monitor
Detail Oriented
Say a Perry Home just won’t do for you. In a state dominated by mass-market builders, what will? Some cautious buyers opt for older homes. Most Victorians were built by real carpenters, back before they were replaced by hand-to-mouth day laborers. Even so, if you’re not a disciple of Bob…
Local Rotation
Geto Boys the Foundation Rap-A-Lot Behind the Geto Boys’ corpse-fucking, race-baiting cartoon cannibalism lurk rap’s most compelling storytellers. The trio breaks down into surprisingly vibrant, vulnerable personalities. Scarface, a diagnosed manic-depressive with suicidal tendencies, alternates street-life stories with disturbing diary entries. Willie D, a slow-drawling brawler, hides straight-razor social commentary…
Tricks and the Trade
At first, a night at the Sex Worker’s Art Show seems akin to a voyeuristic trip to a strip club: It’s fleeting entertainment, a momentary indulgence. They’re sex workers. How deep can they be? Let’s see: One is a playwright who founded an experimental writing collective. Another addresses the politics…
Summary of a Bad Black Movie
First, the good news. Uncharacteristically for a February release targeting African-American viewers, Diary of a Mad Black Woman is not a yuppie romantic comedy featuring Gabrielle Union and Morris Chestnut. Anthony Anderson and Eddie Griffin are nowhere to be seen, and despite the fact that the most memorable character is…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, February 24One of our favorite things about DVDs is all the cool bonus material — especially the deleted scenes with the director’s comments, which let you see the work in progress. So we’re thinking, wouldn’t it be cool to see a visual artist’s work in progress? Today, local artist…
The Camera’s Weeping Eye
Toward the end of Born Into Brothels, a superb and piercing documentary by directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, a 12-year-old child examines a photograph. It’s beautiful, he says, because it shows us how its subjects live. Yes, they’re very poor, and the shot is hard to look at because…
Home Run
Last September, the Press reported on the making of local filmmaker Greg Carter’s project, Resurrection: the J.R. Richard Story. Back then, Carter hoped to finish the movie, a biopic of the legendary Astros pitcher, in time for this year’s Sundance Film Festival. That didn’t happen, but Carter did finish the…
Death Warmed Over Again
Directed by Dan Harris. With Sigourney Weaver, Emile Hirsch, Jeff Daniels, Michelle Williams and Jay Paulson. Rated R.
Beyond the Bovine
THU 2/24 If you thought the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo was just for shit-kickers, FFA students and the dozen or so Lee Greenwood fans not in nursing homes, there’s a whole ‘nother world to explore, with activities that run the gamut from countrified to fancified. The rodeo carnival begins…
Great Clips
Directed by Joe Fab and Elliott Berlin. Featuring the residents of Whitwell, Tennessee. Rated G.
Kicking It
Picture yourself, for a moment, back in those playground glory days: There you are, wearing the kind of T-shirt that years later you’ll be donning purely for irony. Eddie, that nose-picking kid in the Velcro shoes, launches a red rubber ball at you. Your foot meets it straight on, sending…
I Sing! of Nothing New
The angsty twentysomethings who populate I Sing! are as youthfully narcissistic as they come. The young New Yorkers manage to fill up two hours of song and dance on the tiny stage at Theater LaB by singing about their own sorry love problems. Those include all the usual suspects: the…
Oscar Wild
SUN 2/27 The Oscars are like Funyuns: stale, flimsy, not too nutritious. But once you have a taste, you’re committed to finishing them off. Before you know it, it’s midnight, you’re still on the futon, and you keep flinching thinking you’ve seen Gary Busey at the window. Yes, dredging through…
Capsule Reviews
Faust Fest Definitely worth an exploration, the six works being put on by Theatre Collide are loosely — and I mean loosely — based upon Goethe’s Faust story, wherein Faust sells his soul to Satan for worldly pleasures and fame. Four are world premieres; the two shortest pieces (both under…
Dancing Queen
FRI 2/25 “The Graham company would always bear an unsettling resemblance to a religious cult, with the choreographer as high priestess.” So wrote Time magazine in 1998, in an article naming Martha Graham as one of the most important people of the century. Graham was indeed striking and authoritative and…
In Place
Have you ever walked into an empty building and felt that it was haunted — not that it was full of horror-movie ghosts, but that it was somehow stained by the past? It could have been residue from previous occupants. Or maybe it’s that buildings have their own personae, created…
It’s Le Bombe
The bombe d’avocat au crabe at Bistro Moderne is a dome of creamy avocado puree formed around a core of tomato, lump crabmeat and cilantro salsa dressed with vinaigrette and garnished with cilantro and jalapeos. The combination of luscious crab and creamy avocado is an old Gulf Coast classic that…
Capsule Reviews
“Ant Farm 1968-78” Most Houstonians know the art/architectural collective Ant Farm because of its prominent Texas work, the 1974 Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo with its ten vintage Cadillacs buried nose-first in the ground. But Ant Farm’s oeuvre is far broader and more diverse than that one iconic photogenic work. This…