Infernal Reproduction
To find out Infernal Bridegroom Productions’ secret to “putting asses in seats,” one need only turn to the “IBP Bible” portion of the group’s Web site. Audiences have “heard all about the recent leather-themed Shakespeare, with the loud rock music and pretty girls,” it crows. “They do not care. They…
Sticking It to the Man
Attached to the back of a voodoo doll hanging on the wall of The Coffee Bar is the poem “Enron Voodoo’s Special Charm”: “Cold winters he’ll bring…Natural gas prices high, and / Electricity demand exceeding supply,” it reads. “He’ll cast a spell or break a trance: / Visions and values…
Ice Ice Baby
Midway through our phone interview, a stranger approaches Varnaline’s Anders Parker, who was talking on a crackling cell phone in Denton, where he’s rehearsing with Centro-matic, both his backing band and opening act for this tour. The stranger asks him for directions. “I’m not from here,” Parker says. “I don’t…
Oh, Oh, Donna…
Garth James Treadway got arrested in Fort Bend County on a South Carolina charge of endangering a child. The county jail made use of his electrician’s skills while he awaited extradition for five months. Then the well-mannered inmate made trusty and was assigned to kitchen detail. On January 11 around…
Low Fidel-ity
There are two things wrong with Latin music these days: Michael Greene and Fidel Castro,” declares Liz Mendez, a Mexican-American pianist who has worked the local salsa scene for the last 15 years. She sits in a Montrose restaurant nursing a lukewarm coffee and mulling over the continued conflict between…
Liar! Liar! Pants On Fire
Former Harris County GOP chair Gary Polland just can’t seem to shake his habit of using his party position for personal and political gain. Just last week Polland disclosed he’d transferred more than $52,000 from his secret Republican chair’s account to his District 17 Senate race, a move neatly circumventing…
Ruffled Feathers
When the Dixie Chicks take the Astrodome stage at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo on February 12, it will be only their second full concert since 2000. While part of that hiatus can be explained by marriages and childbirths, the main reason is far more complex and much nastier…
A Political “Little Enron”
While investigators sort through records of imploded Enron, a new energy trading outfit has hatched in the shadows of City Hall. PowerSol Energy Marketing, a partnership with close ties to the Orlando Sanchez mayoral campaign, has quietly snagged a 12 percent share of a city contract with Reliant Energy to…
Travis Street Turnaround
On Travis Street, there are a bunch of stories — and Carolyn Wenglar has filed most of them in her head. The soft-spoken, bespectacled, middle-aged redhead knows Travis’s history by heart, pulling names and dates out of her memory the same way 12-year-old boys expertly reveal the hand-controller moves needed…
All In The Family
Dominic Mandola, the youngest chef in the Mandola clan, has a hotel and restaurant management degree from the University of Mississippi and is a 1999 graduate of the School of Culinary Arts at The Art Institute of Houston. With his brother, Luke Jr., he owns the Ragin’ Cajun at 9600…
Starsailor
Meet the new Supertramp, far more trampy than super, and much more melodramatic than a dorm-full of starry-eyed, angst-ridden film students. British, too. Wee-yo. The media is pumped for these nimrods, what with Super Sensitive Guys like Cold-play and Travis sweepin’ the nation with their gently weepin’ guitars. Starsailor’s the…
Whata Lotta Falafel
While Antone’s Import Co. may make the most famous poor boys in town, the local chain is also responsible for a mean falafel sandwich ($3.49). Known as an Israeli hamburger, this fried, totally vegetarian patty — made of ground chickpeas along with parsley, garlic and spices (I detected a hint…
Bobby “Blue” Bland
Here it is now 41 years on — rescrubbed, remastered, reannotated, with two bonus tracks to boot — the greatest album ever recorded (partially) in Houston and released on a local label: Bobby Bland’s Two Steps from the Blues. Of the principal players on the album, only Bland is alive…
Supermodel Cuisine
Ling must be the smiling Chinese gal in the big painting on the restaurant’s wall. That would make the Cuban with the high collar in the other painting Javier. The paintings have the look of a bygone era, like they came from turn-of-the-century cigar boxes. The restaurant named after these…
The American Plague
They may be possessed of all the subtlety of your friendly neighborhood vice squad on a 4 a.m. drug raid, but Knoxville, Tennessee’s the American Plague is far more welcome at your door. The band aims to fuse hardcore punk with the Motor City proto-punk of the MC5 and the…
Brian Jonestown Massacre
Though admittedly and purposefully stuck in a droning, 1967-era psychedelic musical moment, the Brian Jonestown Massacre remains true to the original form. While Oasis (and now the Strokes) wrote songs that sounded too much like mere rip-offs of British Invasion sounds, BJM writes life-stinks, mod-rocker songs that the Stones in…
Sexual Healing
Here’s a stark little oasis of misery to remind you that America sometimes sucks and its denizens aren’t all heroes. Featuring painstaking attention to the copious warts of this big, proud country, Monster’s Ball moseys down South to issue the staggering proclamation that there’s racism in our midst! Fortunately, despite…
Clowns to the Left, Jokers to the Right
Part comedy, part tragedy and all bite, No Man’s Land damns and mocks in equal measure, painting a picture of war’s absurdity that should make peaceniks of us all but likely won’t. Although set in the former Yugoslavia during the Bosnian-Serbian war, the movie transcends its geographic borders: Bosnian-born writer-director…
The Dollhouse Is Burning
If they teach the work of Todd Solondz someday, assuming he’s not already in the curriculum somewhere, the lectures are bound to be rather short. To grasp the material without actually attending class, just bone up on a little bargain-basement Freud, a whiff of primal therapy and a sprinkle of…
Flame On
When Joe Quesada, writer and illustrator of comic books, went to work as a freelance contractor for Marvel Comics three years ago, he found the so-called House of Ideas in ruin. The comic-book industry was, as Quesada recalls, “going down the toilet”: Every month, 10 to 15 percent of readers…
Rewriting History
This just in: Enron wasn’t quite as successful a company as many people believed. This startling news comes to us courtesy of the Houston Chronicle, whose major front-page Sunday story January 27 was headlined “The Myth of Enron.” Enron looked successful, the story said, “but years before its spectacular fall…there…
Of Actors and Singers
Most anyone who’s taken high school English can recall something about Lennie and George, the two lost souls at the center of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Wiry George is full of inborn smarts and keeps his wistful heart buried deep inside. He looks out for lumbering Lennie, who’s…
Art of the Deal
Art of the Deal Spread it around, MFA: Congratulations on an excellent article about Peter Marzio’s bonus [“What’s Wrong with This Picture?” by Jennifer Mathieu, January 17]. There is, however, one point that you neglected to mention. If the MFA had hired a consulting company, the work (and pay) would…
Stux in the South
See it live and in person: Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ — Jesse Helms’s favorite photograph — is on view in Houston. I was always disappointed there wasn’t a follow-up Piss Jesse, but I guess it would take a couple hundred college keg parties’ worth of urine to submerge that porcine…
Keep History Alive
Paul Matthews is a man who loves history. He practically accosts any person who steps through the door of his Buffalo Soldiers National Museum, offering to take them on a personal guided tour. “People think it’s an African-American museum,” the former Vietnam vet says. “No, no, no, no. It’s an…
Up In Smoke
Late in the afternoon of July 31, 2000, a who’s who of Republicans — Texans as well as national party officials — jammed into elevators of a downtown Philadelphia office building, a few blocks from the GOP National Convention. When the doors slid open on the 50th floor, they spilled…