Static
A sound gesture… It wasn’t the most poignant way to go out. Josh Lloyd, a longtime bouncer and ever-present personality at Emo’s, had been depressed for months, and try as they did, none of his friends seemed able to remedy his sadness. Finally, Lloyd, an aspiring artist and sometime musician,…
Souls Shaken, Minds Stirred
“I believe in the possibility of a new era,” Kula Shaker’s frontman, Crispian Mills, once told a leery New York journalist. “You can sing about things like premature teenage sex, or you can sing about everlasting, universal truth.” Hmm, sounds like we’ve got another Bono on our hands. Mills, son…
Out of Zion
So it’s come to this: multitudes of baby bands scouring the legacy of Kurt Cobain for anything usable — and selling lots of CDs by incorporating what they find. Someone dubbed the trend “scrunge” (whoever he or she was must have combined scourge with grunge), and back in 1995 almost…
Rotation
Bloodhound Gang One Fierce Beer Coaster Geffen “Know thyself,” goes one of the commandments of the ancient Greeks. “I’m more tongue and cheek than a lesbo orgy,” goes Jimmy Pop Ali, mouthpiece of the Bloodhound Gang, a twisted band of mall rats from suburban Philadelphia. Where’s the connection? Like their…
Chekhov, Intimately
An aging grande dame sweeps into her childhood home in Russia following a long absence, her youngest daughter and a Parisian entourage in tow, only to find a kitchen full of starving servants and her eldest daughter pressured with the estate’s impending financial doom. Madame Ranevskaya, however, isn’t concerned with…
The Man Behind Andy
Dallas filmmaker Spencer Williams was revered as an idol and a groundbreaker by the black community that flocked to his movies, and rightly so. He was among the first independent filmmakers in America, a black man who knew the racist moviemaking system well enough to use it to his own…
Little Orphan Commie
Kolya is being talked up as the odds-on favorite to cop this year’s Oscar for best foreign-language film. It just might win. It’s cuddly and heartwarming and life-affirming in that sentimental way that tends to impress Academy jurors who favor poky, old-fashioned Hollywood weepies in foreign camouflage. Kolya is a…
Dead Man Acting
While Tupac Shakur lay bleeding to death inside Suge Knight’s car last fall after an attack on the Las Vegas strip — all his crack bodyguards couldn’t even identify the perps’ getaway car — Death Row Records realized it was losing a franchise player. But Hollywood may never have had…
King Con
Steven Russell returned to prison something of a celebrity. His escape — his third, counting two from the Harris County Jail — had made national news by dint of its audacity: This time, he had used a felt-tip pen to dye his prison uniform green, so that it resembled surgical…
The Insider
A Bite on the Backside Now that Astros owner Drayton McLane has gotten Harris County to agree to pay him $19.5 million for his leasehold on the Astrodome, taxpayers might wonder why the lease is valued on the real property rolls of the Harris County Appraisal District at a little…
Letters
Moved Much as I enjoy reading your paper, I have never taken the time to write a letter. After reading Lisa Gray’s story “Ashley Yount Can’t Hear You” [January 16], however, I was literally moved to tears. Every parent can identify with the Younts’ desire to want the best for…
Downtown-on-the-Wold
So a bunch of rich guys stand up and say, “We’re bestowing this wonderful gift on the city of Houston,” and you, the attentive and mildly engaged citizen, are supposed to immediately praise their beneficence and reply, “Wow, thanks, that’s great!” while having the good manners to refrain from asking…
Press Picks
thursday february 6 Vintage poster art Back when advertising was still in its infancy and the poster was the prevailing promotional medium, serious artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, he of small stature and large appetites, sold their talents on behalf of nightclubs, spirits, cigarette papers and other products. The new Retro…
Home on the Grange
New and with an attitude can be a dangerous combination for a restaurant. But there’s an underlying good nature to the Ohio Grange Cafe’s experiments with down-home ingredients cooked with an uptown flair that makes the occasional miscalculations forgivable. Midwestern country cooking that’s strapped on its guns and gone to…
A Feel for the Real
There was a time, about 60 years ago, when jazz was thought of as simply, well, jazz. Smooth, hard, swinging or jagged, it was all music you danced to. But in the mid-’40s, a small group of performers, spearheaded by Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, began thinking that the stylistic scope of…