Rotation
Sublime Second Hand Smoke Gasoline Alley/MCA So what if Sublime’s idea of a good time involved getting high, looting, driving drunk and — in the case of deceased lead singer/songwriter Brad Nowell — ultimately overdosing on heroin? Beneath the tattoos, beer stains and adolescent posturing is (or, more appropriately, was)…
Static
Post-Teens trauma… Though Scott Ayers has been spending a lot of time holed up in his southwest Houston house since his band the Pain Teens broke up three years ago, it’s not as if he’s been sitting around gnawing on his toenails like a total recluse. The underground techno-clatter auteur…
Uncommon Cause
At times, Consolidated seem less like a band than a cause-waving freak show. The quasi-militant San Francisco Bay-area trio is, quite literally, submerged in its own anarchic intentions. Tops among the group’s laundry list of causes: animal rights, vegetarianism, abortion rights and just about any philosophy of governing that shuns…
No Fooling Around
“I had seen the movie ten or 12 times, and it just always stuck out to me.” Chris Laurents, drummer for amiable Houston modern rockers Atticus Finch, is musing over the origins of the band’s name over dinner at a local restaurant, where the band has assembled for a sit-down…
An Old Mystery
If you’ve seen the famous 1944 Ingrid Bergman/Charles Boyer film Gaslight, then you’ve seen Hollywood’s spin on the late British playwright Patrick Hamilton’s dark thriller Angel Street. But what you may not have seen is Hamilton’s original version, which is both quite different from the movie and a terrific whodunit…
This Is Your Brain on Drugs
Would that Half Baked were even as well done as its title implies. This attempt at a contemporary pothead comedy makes you long for the lightness and subtle urbanity of Up in Smoke. It has, maybe, this much of a claim on authenticity — it really does play like something…
Critical Diagnosis
Five years ago, as Texas was expanding its prison system into one of the largest in the world, state Comptroller John Sharp was looking for ways to cut costs. For the previous half-decade, the price of inmate health care had been rising at a rate of 6 percent annually. With…
Do Not Go Gentle
It seems contradictory to describe a movie as both expansive in scope and personal. But The Winter Guest, the first offering from director Alan Rickman, manages to deserve both bits of praise. By focusing on a tiny corner of northern Scotland, and a few people who inhabit it, Rickman quite…
Dripping with Irony
After watching Hard Rain, all but the most intrepid humans and whatever ducks are in the audience will probably feel like changing into dry clothes and curling up in front of a fire with a cup of hot bouillon. This has to be the wettest movie in memory — wetter…
Following the Money
In 1993, when the Legislature passed a bill giving responsibility for most of the medical care of the state’s prison inmates to the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center in Lubbock, it seemed like a good deal for the state and its…
The Insider
Sucker for a Bet Question: What do accused River Oaks wife murderer Robert Angleton, tennis great Jimmy Connors, two professional baseball stars and the chairman of Houston Endowment have in common? Answer: They’re all players in the messy divorce of admitted compulsive gambler Eddy Scurlock Blanton from his wife, Roberta…
Letters
Masterpiece Right on! Alison Cook’s incisive parody of “The Year That Bit” [January 1] was a masterful satire that put Texas Monthly’s “Bum Steer Awards” in pale comparison. Even Esquire’s “Dubious Achievements” plays second to Cook’s “awards,” particularly the frequent references to our resident dimwit, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee! I…
Press Picks
thursday january 22 The Colored Museum George C. Wolfe of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Joseph Papp Public Theatre took home Tonys for his own Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk (A Tap/Rap Discourse on the Staying Power of the Beat) and for his direction of…
Dish
Floyd and Pseudo-Floyd The sign said Floyd’s on Shepherd, but what I walked into was a parallel universe where everything was a bubble out of plumb. In this northwest-of-downtown neighborhood — in all of Houston, likely — the name Floyd has meant reliable Louisiana cooking and rowdy crowds since the…
Fry for Me, Argentina
The day got off to a bad start. The night before, I’d overindulged and was kept awake by indigestion. My remedy when this happens is a light breakfast comprising half an apple pie and a cup of Ghirardelli’s hot chocolate. True, you do feel queasy afterward, but at least the…
Hot Plate
I’m a fool for truffles, and I’d kill for caviar, but in their absence — and absent they usually are — I’ll happily settle for a steak-and-cheese sandwich. I’m addicted to these things, sometimes getting through three or four a week. I’ve tried giving them up. I’ve been in and…
Now They’re Cooking
When the Moog Cookbook was invited to play live on MTV’s Week in Rock, band members Uli Nomi and Meco Eno — a.k.a. Roger Manning and Brian Kehew — didn’t see any drawbacks to accepting, even though it would mark their first-ever concert appearance. But after they donned the mock-futuristic…