The Gospel According to Pac
Tupac is dead. Long live Tupac! Never has a cliché rung so eerily true. Given the circumstances — he was mortally wounded in Las Vegas in 1996 — Tupac remains surprisingly prolific. Albums like The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, R U Still Down? (Remember Me), Still I Rise,…
If That Ain’t Country
Usually, the Houston Museum of Natural Science is the place to see dinosaurs that once walked the earth and jaw-dropping heavenly bodies. But enough about Strom Thurmond and Demi Moore. The HMNS, like many of Houston’s venues, is bringing in nontraditional exhibits and features to attract crowds who enjoy the…
Rock Death in 2003
Live fast, die young and leave a pretty corpse. That juvenile commandment used to be one of rock and roll’s golden rules. But today that attitude is itself dead before its time. Rock deaths ain’t what they used to be. Back in the 1970s, Village Voice rock scribe Greil Marcus…
Get Your Kicks
If water-cooler confabs about the weekend’s box-office numbers send you running for the serenity of your cubicle, don’t despair. The Aurora Picture Show is offering up Truck Stop Still Lifes: Films by Bill Brown as the thinking person’s antidote to those ubiquitous $100 million blockbusters. Texas-born filmmaker Bill Brown hit…
Toni Price
Austin multi-instrumentalist Champ Hood’s death from cancer in November 2001 smashed through Toni Price’s world like a freight train taking out a Honda. She could see the damn thing coming, but no amount of preparedness could help her cope with the impact. The results of her grief and her hopes…
Hangover Hoops
SAT 1/3 It’s the third of January. You haven’t made it out of bed since New Year’s Day, and that bottle of Advil is running low. The only bowl game left is the so-called championship, and you’re watching Most Extreme Elimination Challenge — again. Hey, there’s a world out there!…
My Morning Jacket
A lemming pack of critics has been clambering over one another to praise this Kentucky neo-country/Southern rock quintet. Major music mags here and in the UK have touted My Morning Jacket as America’s best band, serving up festering heaps of hyperbole to exalt this album. Yet if one actually listens…
Freewheelin’
The Pinewood Derby is not a wooden hat. It’s an event in which Cub Scouts carve miniature racers out of wooden blocks and race them down a sloped track in a battle for coveted uniform badges. This weekend you can watch the little woodsmen of Pack 11 wield sandpaper and…
Sixth Annual Townes Van Zandt Wake
Ever since his father died of a heart attack on January 1, 1997, J.T. Van Zandt has pretty much stayed clear of the in-fighting around the legacy that iconoclastic singer Townes Van Zandt left behind. And certainly J.T. has never used his famous name to advance his career — he…
Hot-Rodding with the Top Down
SAT 1/3 “No, we’re not that Dragstrippers,” sighs Blake Johnston, leader of the Houston-based DragStrippers, which shares its handle, if not its capitalization, with the Detroit punk band. “We still have a mutual stand-off with those other guys,” he says. “I think we’ll both keep using the name until somebody…
Heavy, Man
It has become a subject of much discussion and debate among film fetishists in recent weeks: For which movie will Sean Penn win the Academy Award, Mystic River or 21 Grams? Perhaps this seems like so much jockeying for blurbs on a movie poster or a newspaper advertisement — Sean…
South American Spaghetti
Spaghetti al pesto$6.99
Spinach ravioli with red sauce$6.99
Classic cold-cut sandwich $5.99
Beef Milanesa sandwich$5.99
Chicken empanada$1.85
Espresso$1.75
Lying Liar
For all of its inspired side trips down Imagination Lane (let’s call it that, because the “memories” of protagonist Edward Bloom are too majestic to be trusted and too affecting to be discounted), Big Fish is ultimately about one thing: the relationship between a son about to become a father…
A Great Pair of Eggs
A great pair of eggs: The Eggs New Orleans ($8.99) at Café Artiste (1601 West Main, 713-528-3704) are a masterpiece of architectural design and culinary creativity. The base consists of a thin, homemade, pan-fried crab cake sitting under a thick slice of tomato. Steamed spinach is next, followed by a…
The Sorrow and the Pity
As a reader, it can be easy to assume that all the critics at a particular publication are more or less of the same mind, but here at New Times, that isn’t the case. We’re just too damn independent-minded to take our colleagues’ views into consideration, which is why, when…
Lacking Perspectives
Abraham Cruzvillegas’s “assemblages” are put together from found objects, the kind of things unstable older relatives might store in the basement for the day they finally might be needed — or the day one of their younger, “artistic” relatives needs to put together a show. Descending the stairs at the…
Harvard and the Boogeyman
On a recent Friday night — like most nights when the Houston Aeros play a home game — the new $235 million Toyota Center downtown can seem like the most expensive mausoleum ever built. The Aeros spent years as a franchise in the International Hockey League, a league one hockey…
Crash Course
You may not be aware of it, but Houstonians are getting a regular dose of high-priced street entertainment these days. Once a week for the last month, an automobile has collided with a Metro light rail car as the transit agency does a series of test runs in advance of…
Party of One
State Representative Ron Wilson has always marched to the beat of a different drummer, rarely falling in line with his colleagues in the Harris County Democratic delegation and frequently skewering them with verbal zingers and legislative booby traps. Now that he’s the only black Texas lawmaker to have voted for…
Hard to Stomach
Since January, Kaye Parsley has lost 40 pounds, thousands of dollars in wages and much of her short-term memory. Only the weight loss was desired. After struggling with obesity for most of her life, Parsley, a single mother who lives in Magnolia, had her stomach stapled in July 2002. The…
Drop Everything
FRI 1/2 Unless you’ve got a bunch of those long-out-of-print CTI and Kudu LPs from the ’70s (especially those albums that featured the funk-heavy swing of Grover Washington Jr., George Benson and Idris Muhammad), the chances of hearing a synergy of funk and jazz on a recurring basis are pretty…
Letters
Ab(w)horing the Thought Gag ‘n gargle: Thanks for the article [“The Breakfast Club,” by Wendy Grossman, December 11]. I enjoyed reading it, but then again, I enjoy watching very early John Waters movies. I kept reading the article and thinking “eeewww.” If ever anyone thought of street prostitution as being…
Let the Picture Paint Itself
“The Houston Kid was my first record,” Rodney Crowell says, “and Fate’s Right Hand is my second record.” That’s a hell of a thing to hear from someone with more than a dozen albums to his credit. Especially when those titles include 1981’s Rodney Crowell, which featured such enduring originals…
The Present Time
No gift is more personal than one that’s made by hand. The mix tape, though, is especially intimate — after all, when you’re making one, you can use anything in the history of recorded music to create a personal message. The technology has, of course, evolved over the years, and…
Colorado River Blues
Austin did a number on me. — “Ramblin’ Blues,” Eric Hisaw Austin may have done a number on Las Cruces, New Mexico, native Eric Hisaw, but he’s been there long enough to have gained some perspective on his impetuous move to the Live Music Capital. “I was 18 when I…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, January 1 Come on ride the train, choo-choo ride it. Happy new year, y’all, and welcome to the future of Houston. Despite the fact that folks have been mindlessly turning left in front of the new light rail on its test runs down Main, causing minor accidents and slow-downs,…