Press Picks
thursday january 12 Dance Month master classes As movement mavens know, it’s Dance Month at the Kaplan Theatre. Today, amateurs who are at the intermediate or advanced level can train with national pros. Loretta Livingston offers a master class in modern dance and Sara Ayres offers a master class in…
Bombay Buffet
Only when the mercury drops can I contemplate an Indian lunch buffet without trepidation. Under tropical conditions, allowing myself free rein at tables laden with richly complex, stick-to-your ribs food leaves me feeling poleaxed, good for nothing, in dire need of a siesta. But let the weather cool, and I’m…
Ray Wylie Gets Intense
There’s a lot of hooey these days about old outlaws and rowdy friends settling down, and Johnny Cash has become an elder statesman of MTV. Ray Wylie Hubbard, however, has taken a different tack. He’s decided that middle age is the time to become more intense. Loco Gringo’s Lament, his…
Buddy Ace Moves On
Buddy Ace’s death of a massive heart attack while singing “Time To Move On” at a Waco nightclub early Christmas morning was an eerily coincidental demise for the veteran balladeer, whose career, stage name and image were patterned after another performer who also died at a Christmas performance. But Buddy…
Blowing His Own Horn
On the phone from his Manhattan office, jazz trumpeter Wallace Roney sounds dubious about the interview from the start, as if he’s been through this a few too many times already and knows well enough that there’s no way that what he does for a living, which is play music,…
Rotation
Scarface The Diary Rap-a-Lot Records/Noo Trybe Records You wouldn’t know it from reading the local press, but Scarface and the rest of the Geto Boys are Houston’s biggest musical export. With his numbers and chart success, you can be damn sure that if Scarface were white and country, he’d have…
Pop Moment
Bad News Leads: The loose-knit Herb Life movement, comprising local Planet Shock! and offshoots Cloud Nine and Laveau’s Thursday night Dub House event, had a brush with philosophically incompatible thugs December 29, when a group of unidentified males went on a violence spree in Laveau’s parking lot after the Montrose-area…
Eating on the Cutting Edge
Word of mouth comes to a fast boil on the foodie circuit: if this is January 1995, any Inner Loopster worth his Kosher salt can be found at the brand-new Daily Review Cafe, dining on stylish comfort food and keeping watch over the door. You feel the eyes — curious,…
World Enough, and Slime
As the “greed” installment in their self-proclaimed “sin season,” Theater LaB presents Search and Destroy, Howard Korder’s grimly entertaining play about the fast-driving world of power and money. It’s a sharp-edged and sophisticated, although finally rather prosaic, tour of American disenchantment. Korder’s protagonist, Martin Mirkheim, is a wannabe Master of…
Singin’ on the Screen
Of all the various film genres, the one that’s had the least success in recent years is musicals. Why that is, is anyone’s guess; it could be that, like the western, another genre considered dead not too long ago, the musical is just waiting for the right people to bring…
B.S. 101
Writer-director John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood was a triumph of intimate storytelling — an African-American melodrama set in a bullet-riddled South Central Los Angeles populated by believable characters who possessed strong, simple emotions. While watching it, you knew (except during a couple of “message” scenes) that you were in…
Killer Behind the Badge
It was just after midnight on August 25, 1992, and Susan White’s worst fear was on the verge of coming true. With the shrill and panicked sound of her home burglar alarm in the background, White struggled to get her wits about her, to overcome the grogginess brought on by…
Clunkers R Us
It’s known in official bureaucrat-ese as the “Accelerated Vehicle Retirement Program,” but even bureaucrats refer to it as “the clunker-junker” or “scrappage” plan. It’s the one response to the government mandate requiring Houston to purify its air that so far hasn’t drawn much public opposition (or detection), although even those…
Video Pulpit
NO FEAR,” Eric Andell intones to the wretched-looking youth gazing up at him. “Or is it, ‘NO FEAR, DEAR?'” Andell is trying to decipher the message obscured in the folds of the teenager’s T-shirt. The young defendant’s casual look isn’t unusual, since no one much dresses up for Andell’s new…
Letters
Sizzling Bacon One of the nice things about being an American is that part of our birthright is the right to be as ignorant and insulting as we wish to our public figures, whether they be presidents, mayors or judges. This right we owe to our forefathers’ anger at the…