Hot Plate
Make Mine the Special Some restaurant specials are more special than others. At Brennan’s, diners who opt for chef Carl Walker’s daily offerings often end up with the best food in the house. Walker has an almost uncanny affinity for shanks: witness his extraordinary winter-time lamb shanks braised with vegetables…
The fight to save the Katy Prairie
A half-hour before dawn on New Year’s Day, a covey of birdwatchers parked by the side of the road near Warren Lake, about two miles south of the town of Hockley, in the northeastern sector of the Katy Prairie. The lake is part of the Warren Ranch, a 5,700-acre property…
Picks
Thursday January 20 Lucia di Lammermoor Italian soprano Tiziana Fabbricini makes her HGO debut in the title role, following a year of rather impressive debuts with the Metropolitan Opera, the Vienna State Opera etc., etc.,` etc. HGO presents six performances of Donizetti’s splendid opera — don’t miss a chance to…
Nuevo Voss
Tamale bisque sat cheekily on the menu; a brooding, wall-length mural coaxed tired south-of-the-border cliches into the uneasy realm of dreams. So I was immediately inclined to root for Escalante’s Comida Fina, a sleek and ambitious new Mexican eatery on the edge of Second Baptistland, that burgeoning commercial mecca at…
Sing, Muse, the Wrath of Ma Rainey
Playwright August Wilson credits the blues with giving him a voice and a history. As a young poet in search of a subject and a style, he happened upon the music of Bessie Smith and discovered a whole culture and tradition — his own. When he later came to write…
Fever Pitch
Doors slammed in such a life-and-death fashion that they sound like pistol shots. Ringing phones that never shut up and bosomy beauties who never give up. Determined defenders of the logic of outlandish antics. Hilarious characters who have no intention of being funny. Do-si-dos in the closet and interludes in…
Playing the Blues
Playwright August Wilson’s declared ambition is to write a play set in each decade of the twentieth century, exploring some major aspect of African-American culture and history. Since the 1984 production of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (currently on the Alley’s Large Stage), his plays have enjoyed both popular success and…
The Belfasters
In recent years the Irish have quietly begun a sort of national cinema. I say “quietly” because they haven’t received the fanfare of the Chinese cinema (both on and off the mainland), and “sort of” because films from My Left Foot to The Commitments to The Crying Game all deal…
Anatomy of a Scam
The movie season is about to get interesting — finally. Six Degrees of Separation, with its wit, structural and visual daring, and bracing take on its characters, is only the second film in months (after Schindler’s List) to be well worth seeing. The film opens memorably, putting its audience in…
Stella
The Museum of Fine Arts kicks off its Greek film festival in fine form with Stella (1955), a good old-fashioned melodrama about a small town’s big woman who loves men hard and leaves them fast. It’s one of eleven movies that the Museum of Modern Art presented this past spring…
Wrestling Ernest Hemingway
If you want to see four old pros who really know what they’re doing, watch Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, a small, touching movie about elderly friendship. Nothing much happens here — which is as it should be, when the cast boasts Richard Harris, Robert Duvall, Shirley MacLaine and Piper Laurie. An…
Press Briefs
And If Elected, She Won’t Serve In its New Year’s issue, The Nation, that old-line, hard-fighting, New York-based liberal weekly, ran a front-page editorial in favor of Molly Ivins’s running for the U.S. Senate seat that’ll be up for grabs shortly. The Nation listed as our heroine’s short-form qualifications that…
Play It Again, Sam!
It may or may not have put the fear of the Lord in the hearts of area gang members, but the recent announcement by Houston police chief Sam Nuchia of a new zero-tolerance crackdown on gangs has raised questions among members of Nuchia’s own command staff and among civil libertarians…
Letters
What This County Needs Is More Pregnant Teenagers It was very nice to see your article “See No Evil, Teach No Evil” [News and Features, by Bernadette Gillece, January 6] presented in a very balanced manner. What was portrayed in the article was a group of people trying to change…
Fat Chance
Joint Chiefs’ music has been described many ways in the nearly three-and-a-half years since the band first formed here in Houston. Fans and critics who latch first onto Jay Maulsby’s vocals can easily mistake the Chiefs for a bad heavy metal band (wrong clothes and long, fractured songs), and Maulsby’s…
Doomed or Domed?
The clubs open, the clubs close… You wouldn’t know it from the ads they’ve been running this past week, but Harvey’s Club Deluxe, opening January 21 with the Joint Chiefs CD release party, was doing business not so long ago under the name Catal Huyuk. According to the ads, though,…