Night & Day
Thursday February 4 La Bare has long been popular for such special occasions as bachelorette parties and divorce celebrations, but now owner, general manager and former dancer Chris Domangue is trying to attract businesswomen for everyday lunches with clients and happy hours with colleagues. He’s moved the club down Richmond…
Class of ’98
I hate all the year-in-review columns that crop up every January, reminiscing on everything from music videos to auto manufacturing and straining to impose meaning and order within the arbitrary confines of the Julian calendar. These retrospectives are like holiday fruitcakes: dreaded, inevitable and dull. So it is with apologies…
Segovian Six-Stringer
Most teenagers looking for guitar heroes in the late sixties and early seventies were drawn to Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. But a young Eliot Fisk looked to classicist Andres Segovia. “It’s weird thing,” Fisk says, “like some seed of some Spanish tree being blown across…
Zen and the Art of Sandwich-Making
Paulie’s serene little Montrose deli has saved me from the fast-food circles of hell more times than I can count. Faster than you can say “Mickey D’s,” I’ve dashed in during errand-running marathons or in the throes of a 30-minute lunch and whizzed out again, clutching a paper bag of…
Hot Plate
I’ve often wondered whether Cajuns engineer culinary oddities just to see if Texans will eat them, and I looked seriously askance at the filet mignon-on-a-stick, $10.95, at Bourbon St. Bistreaux [5555 Morningside, (713)522-9133]. Surprise: This steak snack is actually quite tasty. Admirable chunks of beef tenderloin are cooked to order,…
Good Night
Before the lights dimmed at the opening of A Little Night Music, someone in the audience told his companions to get ready for a PG-13 production. The use of movie ratings to describe a Stephen Sondheim musical shows how unfocused our stage sensibilities have become. But Houston Grand Opera’s Night…
Hot Country Punksters
In Austin, the obsessively self-referential city that calls itself “The Live Music Capital of the World,” there is an unwritten book of frequently apocryphal notions about its music scene. One of the major fancies that turns out to be true is that it’s a place where most anyone with the…
Remedial Racism
It is perhaps impossible to overstate the effects of slavery on contemporary American culture. Though the institution officially ended over a hundred years ago, Jim Crow laws kept many African-Americans under the collective thumb of an often inhumane white authority well into the 20th century. And still, with the civil…
Hitting the Blue Notes
With the possible exception of Verve, no record label is associated with jazz more than Blue Note Records. Founded by German immigrant Alfred Lion and writer/financier Max Margulis, Blue Note’s beginnings were modest. Lion produced a recording session featuring boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis on January 6,…
Paradise Lost
Halfway through Another Day in Paradise, a leather-clad Melanie Griffith hauls a rifle into a hotel room where a drug deal has just gone sour. She proceeds to shoot a bad guy between the legs and tells him she’s nobody’s bitch. Apparently, the attempt is to shock, but it just…
Rotation
Ray Wylie Hubbard Live at Cibolo Creek Country Club Misery Loves Company Mythology can be a very powerful and sometimes dangerous thing. This is something Dallas native Ray Wylie Hubbard no doubt understands. A veteran of the early 1970s’ great progressive country scare, he mainly left myths in his wake…
Pulp Friction
The new Mel Gibson vehicle, Payback, is arguably the first major-studio release this year to have even a modicum of aesthetic ambition. For his directorial debut, Brian Helgeland — who won an Oscar for his screenplay for 1997’s L.A. Confidential (co-written with director Curtis Hanson) — has chosen to adapt…
Slightly Off Kilter
On the quintet’s third and latest record, Prolonging the Magic, Cake gives lots of play to its country influences, without giving up much of its laid-back attitude. With wordplay bordering on absurd, singer/guitarist John McCrea deadpans lyrics while the band bangs out crystalline grooves, often accented by the lonesome country…
Rushmore or Less
In the 1993 hit Groundhog Day, Bill Murray played a show-biz smart-ass who grew into a human being. Murray added a core of warmth and romance to his comic arsenal without losing his zinging wit and crack-up irony, and he’s kept that progress going, even in piddling vehicles such as…
Becoming a Lead Dog
With its third major label CD, How Does Your Garden Grow, Better Than Ezra has stretched well beyond the guitar/bass/drums trio sound of its previous CDs, Deluxe and Friction, Baby. Fans accustomed to such songs as “Good,” “In the Blood” and “King of New Orleans,” built around melodic vocals and…
Inner-city Shootout
Twenty years ago, not long after she moved from San Francisco, Gayle Ramsey and her neighbors in Montrose wanted some potholes fixed but were told by city officials to get in line: It might take years before public works got around to their neck of the woods. So Ramsey and…
Barney! Biz! Bluebonnets!
Passengers sit placidly at the gate, waiting to board a plane at Houston’s Hobby Airport. Most of them are reading silently when a sudden gust sweeps through: Loud bluster from a boastful man. Texas Monthly publisher Mike Levy is on their flight. They lift their eyes above book and magazine…
Outside Agitator
Some might say Marc Levin is industrious. When the 22-year-old wanted to start a student group at Rice that would bring conservative speakers to campus to “enrich public dialogue,” he went ahead and wrote up a student group mission statement and constitution. He found a faculty member to sponsor the…
We Read Thom Marshall So You Won’t Have To
Don’t worry if you didn’t read Thom Marshall’s latest columns in the Chronicle. Here’s what you missed: January 13: The Metropolitan Transit Agency chief should continue being called general manager. (Bonus insight: “Some segments of society make use of special titles not found in other segments — pope, mayor, chef.”)…
The Wooden Indian Ticket?
Okay. Now that the initial jeering from the skeptics’ gallery at our imaginary campaign button is tapering off, seriously contemplate the very real possibility that Houston Mayor Lee Patrick Brown could make the short list as a vice presidential strolling mate for Democratic contender and current Veep Al Gore. At…
Letters
Paving The Way It was amusing to note Bob Litke’s comment that “commercial development mixed with residential development is good use of land” in Brian Wallstin’s excellent article [“Looking for Answers Down Below,” January 21]. That soon-to-be-developed toxic waste site is within pellet-rifle range of at least four of my…
News of the Weird
Lead Stories *Since 1996 accused murderer and paranoid schizophrenic Eric Brown has been rendered incompetent to stand trial, but officials at Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts said recently that he had made enough progress while on medication that a trial can be scheduled. In December, however, Brown demanded to be…
Dance of Darkness
You’ve seen the flexed feet, the heavy plies and the gut-wrenching contractions that characterize the Martha Graham-based ballet rebellion that is Western modern dance. But compared to the Japanese dance form butoh, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Created by Tatsumi Hijikata in 1959 and made popular in the ’80s by…