Roadkill: A Love Story
This cat, Michael Hames explains, isn’t prime roadkill. Dead cats are a dime a dozen; this one’s old and dehydrated, in one piece, and there’s not much blood. But it is flat. Flat’s a plus. Michael snaps his usual three photos, one close up, the others further back and from…
Houston Hosts Parks
When Jason Nodler and his Infernal Bridegroom Productions agreed to hook up with DiverseWorks and Loris Bradley, Houston theater got better. In the past, IBP made a name for itself doing plays most theaters won’t touch, including works by Beckett and Brecht. But it is the original pieces this group…
News of the Weird
Lead Stories *In September a Tennessee appeals court rejected a woman’s challenge to a child custody ruling that she said endangers her twelve-year-old son. According to the court: “Record does not support finding that unsupervised visitation with husband puts child in danger. [T]here is not one whisper of anything improper…
Rail Riders
They rode the rails, panhandled dinners and called no man boss. Indeed, American hoboes of the 1930s lived lives of seemingly mythical proportions. They acted out our collective wanderlust and were wholly independent of nagging spouses, whining children and backbreaking work. It’s surprising that not more has been written about…
Letters
Vanity Fare I just came across Stuart Eskenazi’s article [“Why Are These Men Dull?” February 4]. Speaking as an aspiring journalist, I’m glad to see that someone finally decried Texas Monthly’s arrogance. I’m a student at the University of Texas at Austin, and the journalism department here holds Texas Monthly…
The Good, Long Look
Catherine Murphy pays close attention to the mundane and unobtrusive; her extraordinary, hauntingly beautiful paintings are of things seen on the quick, in a glimpse: a child’s plastic wading pool, a red brick chimney, a wide, black belt cinching the waist of a woman in a striped dress, the view…
Night & Day
Thursday February 25 Jon Lovitz may be no Phil Hartman, but NBC’s bereaved News Radio is still broadcasting its fifth season, and Joe Rogan’s beefy but dimwitted handyman is still puttering around the office souping up copy machines and such. Rogan’s sitcom status may help attract audiences to his standup…
Oh, Sister
Director Garry Marshall (Pretty Woman, Beaches) has always tended toward unrealistically feel-good movies, and The Other Sister is no exception. Billed as “a love story for the romantically challenged,” it concerns a mentally challenged young woman (Juliette Lewis) struggling for independence from her overprotective mother (Diane Keaton). With the exception…
Under Pressure
Forget the “wax on, wax off” stuff you learned from Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid. According to former karate tournament champ and current instructional book and video guru George Dillman, it’s all wrong. “We as martial artists,” he says, “were caught up in lies.” It was 83-year-old Okinawan tenth-degree…
Ultra Lights
Under the opening titles of 200 Cigarettes, we hear Bow Wow Wow’s near-peerless bubble-gum anthem “I Want Candy.” The movie that follows seems designed to satisfy that craving — it’s sweet, tart, brightly colored, insubstantial and utterly lacking in nutritional value. It’s also fun to consume and harmless enough as…
His and Hers
Once in a while, men need to be men, and women need to get away from them. Sometimes, this separation is as simple as the stereotypical boys’ night at the sports bar or a girlie shopping spree. But other times, it takes the form of entire gender-skewed weekends. Such is…
Play It Again, Sham
Between the current nostalgia for platform shoes and the epidemic of midlife crisis that has so many baby boomers in its grip, director Brian Gibson’s Still Crazy just might be able to find an audience among the disturbed, the deafened and the disenchanted. It is, after all, the comic tale…
Hot Plate
When is a muffuletta not a muffuletta? When it’s a hot Paisano ($4) at Mandola’s Deli and Sandwich Shop [4105 Leeland, (713)223-5186], served well within striking distance of downtown or the University of Houston main campus. Mandola’s goes the garden-variety muffuletta one better by toasting the long French roll and…
The Fix Is In
When the results of last spring’s Texas Assessment of Academic Skills were reported, little Kashmere Gardens Elementary was the star of the show in the Houston Independent School District. The nearly all-black inner-city school had outdone itself since the previous year, when only 54 percent of the school’s fourth-graders had…
Dish
Temple of Doom A little swath of pseudorain-forest bit the dust with the closing of Dale Peters’s ambitious Amazon 2050 A.D. restaurant and club, which shuttered February 6 after less than eight months in business. Built on the ashes of the former 8.0 in the Shepherd Plaza strip center, the…
The Librarian Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet
There was no telling at first what William Price meant by “big news” when he called the Houston Press on the afternoon of February 2 from his doctor’s office, where he had gone when his blood pressure shot sky high after the day’s events. To Price, a librarian at Kashmere…
The Devil Makes Him Do It
Wesley Willis is standing inside a record store in the fashionable Wrigleyville area of Chicago, waiting. The large keyboard in his backpack looks small compared to his six-and-a-half-foot, 300-pound-plus frame. He yells, “Get away from me,” when I introduce myself as the person he is supposed to meet. Just as…
Breaking the Blue Code
Last month the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled sharply in favor of a cop who claimed that the Houston Police Department made her life miserable after she broke the department’s code of silence. Officer Patrice Sharp had been assigned to the department’s mounted patrol. In her 1994…
Bohemian Rhapsody
In last weekend’s production of Puccini’s La Boheme, Opera in the Heights performers reminded audiences of one truism, easily forgotten since the advent of the Three Tenors and Jessye Norman’s televised Christmas concerts. It’s hard to surpass opera as it was meant to be experienced: live, on an intimate stage,…
News Hostage
Pay No Attention to the Man on the Crutches It took only two games of the truncated NBA season to show that Rockets Myopia is once again in full swing here in Houston. Our local sports experts, fresh from last year’s disastrous predictions that an aging, whining group of fading…
Jazz for the Masses
Sometimes Houston is lucky if one nationally known jazz act is playing in town on a given weekend. Well, even though it’s typically famine or famine ’round these parts, this weekend it’s a feast. Five world-renowned jazz acts will make their way into Houston this weekend. And if you play…
Fatal Illness Claims Renaissance
Houston Renaissance Inc., the nonprofit organization formed by a group of real estate professionals to rehabilitate Fourth Ward, died last week at the age of four. The official cause of death has not been released. However, Renaissance, which doubled as a jobs program for certain Houston law firms and real…
Shake Your Sheilas
The Chieftains are, quite simply, the most beloved and most popular traditional Irish music performers in modern times. Long before the current fad for All-Things-Celtic, these rogues with brogues have been proving night after night that Irish music is far more than turgid tales of potato famines, drowned lovers or…
Public and Private Doug
Now that Houston Renaissance is, as they say, pushing up daisies, the nonprofit’s project to rebuild Fourth Ward has been turned over to Doug O. Williams. He is chairman of the Midtown Redevelopment Authority, a tax-subsidized venture to redevelop 600 acres between downtown and the Texas Medical Center. But if…
Rotation
Sebadoh The Sebadoh Sub Pop Like a warm, woolen sweater, Sebadoh is functional and comforting when you need it, but itchy when you don’t. After 1997’s dismal Harmacy it looked as if ten years of records of varying sound and song quality had taken their toll. The band’s usual ingredients…
Buffalo Bill
The Enhanced Public Participation Coalition wants to make life better for the average Texan. This collection of industry trade groups that includes the Texas Chemical Council and the Greater Houston Partnership has proposed a bit of legislation that will reflect the beneficence of its name: the Enhanced Public Participation Process…
Drive-thru Bliss
For most of us, fast food is an ugly fact of life; it’s the dull, greasy stuff you eat because you’re short on time and money. But cheap, quick food can be done well — and Chacho’s is proof. For starters, the restaurant’s cheerful: Even on a cloudy, steel-gray day,…
Not a Pretty Picture
An institution shaped by a singular vision, as the tiny, prestigious Menil Collection shaped was by its founder, Dominique de Menil, is at its most vulnerable after the founder dies, as de Menil did 14 months ago. While de Menil’s vision is still the guiding principle of the institution, even…
It’s a Grill!
Two decades after moving to Houston, I still miss autumn. In particular I long for the crisp smell of smoke on cold air: the tangy haze of leafy bonfires, the blue-gray contrails from fireplaces. The next-best thing to a Yankee fall, I’ve discovered, is to cruise along Kirby with the…
The Devil, You Say?
The government’s novel prosecution against five Spring Shadows Glen psychiatric hospital workers wasn’t going well as it entered its sixth month of testimony in early February. The defendants stood accused of insurance fraud by brainwashing patients and implanting devilishly false memories. Unbeknownst to both sides, at least ten of the…
Cop vs. Cop
Paulino Zavala looked like a scumbag. He had tattoos, sleepy eyes and a got-it-going-on attitude. On the street, real scumbags couldn’t tell he was an undercover cop. He made it past the street’s paranoia, busted his share of dealers and, until ’96, was a rising star in the Houston Police…