What a Joke
There are few experiences more giddy than realizing you’ve become a character trapped in a bad movie, and there’s no way to roll the credits without finishing your dinner. The new Fakawwee Lodge, the latest cubic zirconia in the Shepherd Plaza crown, is the source of such experiences. It’s a…
Here Comes the Judd
Three years ago, Wynonna Judd seemed set to become the new queen of country music. As half of the Judds, Wynonna crafted with mother Naomi a blend of earthy twang and slickness that helped reignite country’s traditionalist movement in the early ’80s. Over a seven-year, seven-album period, the pair scored…
Back to Earth
Four years ago last September, Dane Sonnier was hunkered down at Houston’s Rivendell Recorders with the Galactic Cowboys. The group had just begun work on its second national release, Space in Your Face, and expectations for the effort were unusually high, given the sorry sales performance of the Houston quartet’s…
Sound Check
Kids music of one form or another has been around pretty much as long as kids have. You’ve got your nursery tunes (London Bridge may now be in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, but it’s still falling down, and that itsy bitsy spider will probably never make it to the top…
Static
Carefully considering Carolyn… I was sitting at home the other day with a cold beverage near at hand, Carolyn Wonderland’s new Bursting with Flavor CD cued on the hi-fi and a hard assignment staring me in the face: I had decided I was going to jot down all the reasons…
A Van for All Seasons
The news that there’s a new Van Morrison CD out should be thrilling. But for some of us, there have been so many Morrison discs in the last year alone that it’s a bit anticlimactic. Of course, it’s a terrible thing to complain about too many Van Morrison CDs. It’s…
Swangin’ and Bangin’ … and getting to that other level with the disciples of screw
There are certain neighborhoods in Houston where, late at night and into the early hours of the morning, well-groomed cars with large speakers bolted into their trunks thrum along back streets, sound waves vibrating the galvanized steel above carports and, occasionally, the car that pulls up alongside. Behind the tinted…
Bumpy Ride
In the two decades since Eraserhead, David Lynch has established himself as American cinema’s premier surrealist, our own Wizard of Weird. Although his first two Hollywood projects — The Elephant Man and Dune — had room only around the edges for the sort of spooky shit at which he excels,…
A Sharp Right
In Norman Mailer’s The Fight, his great book on the Muhammad Ali/George Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle,” he begins by writing of Ali, “There is always the shock in seeing him again. Not live as in television but standing before you, looking his best. Then the World’s Greatest Athlete is…
A Question of Competence
On March 7 of last year, Beverly Goodie, a kindergarten teacher at Cage Elementary School, was fired. Given that the Houston Independent School District has 11,600 teachers, the firing of one of them might not seem unusual. As it happens, it is. HISD teachers are rarely told to pack their…
Lunch with LLaughing BBoy
The University of Houston’s most notorious graduate student is waiting for me outside the grounds of Congregation Beth Israel. For a man who’s single-handedly created “an environment of fear” in the UH history department, as one professor recently told the Daily Cougar, Fabian Vaksman is decidedly unprepossessing. He’s short and…
The Insider
Judicial Two-fer? It’s not often that judges go to court in Texas with their jobs at stake, but Houston may soon be the site of not one but two such tribunals. The Insider has learned that the 11-member State Commission on Judicial Conduct will conduct court hearings to consider removing…
Letters
DOA Tim Fleck continues to do a disservice to those of us practicing responsible journalism in Houston. Now that I’ve been on the receiving end of his careless, damn-the-consequences reporting, I’ve developed a keener appreciation of why so many localbusinessmen and businesswomen distrust the media and shy away from dealings…
Press Picks
thursday february 27 The Rite of Spring and Elite Syncopations “Wow, he’s in great shape” is the polite response when viewing the publicity photos of Houston Ballet principal dancer Carlos Acosta in The Rite of Spring, but an emphatic “Damn!” would be more in line with the score’s explosive history…