Ride Like the Wind
It’s a real misrepresentation of what we’re all about here on this planet — at least I think,” says Sterling LeBlanc, Ph.D., assistant director of NASA’s Art Program. He’s referring to the music of singer-songwriter Christopher Cross. An unlikely source of controversy, to say the least, this marks the second…
The Cow Says “Oink”
Zin was quiet at 1:30 on a Tuesday afternoon. My editor and I had the upscale bistro on Louisiana Street all to ourselves. I looked over the menu with some puzzlement. I had seen a veal dish I wanted to order on Zin’s online menu, but I couldn’t find it…
Bash-ing the Bigwigs
As some of you may have heard, on February 1 there will be an athletic contest over at Reliant Stadium pitting the Carolina Panthers against the New England Patriots. The Super Bowl has never been known much for nuance or subtlety — it’s about as understated as a fire-red 30-foot-long…
Bling Thing
The Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, an organization dedicated to using rap to better the world, is having a workshop in Houston during Super Bowl week. The theme of the conference, held in conjunction with Texas Southern University, is “Taking Back Responsibility: Youth, Economic and Political Empowerment.” Speakers will feature rappers…
G Unit
It’s been almost a year since 50 Cent told us we could find him in da club with a bottle full of bub. Since then, he’s become rivals with the increasingly ubiquitous Snoop for the title of nation’s favorite gangsta. He’s got a lot going on — at times it…
The Original Shame Sentence?
In 22 years as a Harris County district judge, Lloyd “Ted” Poe garnered gallons of ink and miles of videotape from a fawning local media with his zany so-called shame sentences for defendants in his court. They all had a common theme: In addition to jail time and fines, the…
Trish Murphy
Trish Murphy was a contender, likely still is. After all, she’s got the goods: a vivid voice that runs from girlish glee to womanly growl, songwriting skills that on occasion hit the bull’s-eye, a stunning and sexy yet girl-next-door presence. And after she made a play for the brass ring…
Caring for Clairice
The last time anyone saw Clairice Blackshire alive, she was naked, drunk and walking from her apartment room to the North Freeway feeder road. She had been living at the Northline Inn at Crosstimbers and I-45, a former Howard Johnson’s hotel that is now a privately owned affordable housing complex…
Country Teasers, with NTX+ Electric Deth
Brits the Country Teasers are often labeled either talentless or inept. There are frequent assertions that they simply have no clue about how to play their instruments. The music geeks at über-trendy Pitchfork.com were particularly nasty: “dumb, improvisational noise-rock”; “remarkably infantile and incomprehensible”; “these are either terrible songs or terrible…
Letters
White Sale Disgusted with Dillard’s: In March 2001, a friend and I were shopping at the Dillard’s in Sugar Land’s First Colony Mall [“A Closer Look at Dillard’s,” by Margaret Downing, January 8]. I found the Ralph Lauren shirt I wanted with an original price of $50 marked down on…
Supagroup
Supagroup. The name is cheeky and audacious — do they really mean that? In this postmodern age, when one can easily wonder if any band can truly be said to rock, does Supagroup really want us to have, ahem, “Blind Faith” that they are, in fact, a group of epic…
Shooting Gallery
For some, the words “gun” and “art” don’t sit well in the same sentence. But the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s new show, “Three Centuries of Tradition: The Renaissance of Custom Gunmaking in America,” brings the two together. The exhibit showcases European and American firearms and accessories. “To many people,…
Caroline Herring
Talk about a ramblin’ gal. Country, folk and bluegrass singer-songwriter Caroline Herring has ventured from her native Mississippi to Texas to D.C. and finally to Georgia following her muse (and her and her husband’s various day gigs). Austinites got to know her well from 1999 to 2002 when she appeared…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, January 22 Gung hay fat choy, everybody. If your new year hasn’t gotten the cracking start you’d hoped for, today is another chance for you to get it right. Asians the world over are saying good-bye to the Year of the Goat (calm, kind) and welcoming the Year of…
Legally Bland
Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! opens with a movie within the movie. It’s the 1940s, and a hunky, square-jawed soldier (played by Tad Hamilton, who’s played by Josh Duhamel) stops his car along the side of a damp road; a woman, dressed in virginal nursing whites, gets out of…
Raw Deal
A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but disaster is definitely in the cards for two brothers named Lincoln and Booth. Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Topdog/Underdog, recounts how two ill-named brothers struggle to make something of themselves despite the historical legacy of their namesakes. A shoplifter…
Dude, Where’s My Temporal Orientation?
There is a recent generation of American men who came of age too late for free love and wanton property-grabbing, and too early for post-grunge emotional wankery and info-age immediacy. Stuck on their iceberg, isolated by oceans from anything real like the original punk or goth movements, or Australia’s cinematic…
The Way We Wore
THU 1/22 Ah, blue jeans. Is there a garment quite as ingenious in its versatility? Jeans are comforting yet sexy, timeless yet trendy. Whether running errands or heading out for a night on the town, we humans have adopted jeans as a worldwide uniform. But it wasn’t always like this…
Proof Positive
One of the most extraordinary aspects of David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Proof is the way the script weaves real whodunit suspense into the complex geometry of family drama. The family in question is composed of two daughters dealing with the recent death of their father. Fear, grief, guilt — all…
Deeply Felt
WED 1/28 Without a doubt, pool is the most popular bar game of all. It’s less labor- and space-intensive than bowling and more social than pinball. And it beats Golden Tee, always. It’s the game you get good at after a few beers — and really bad at after a…
Jazz Show
I always thought it would be a cool idea to mount an art exhibit that had a soundtrack, and David McGee’s show at DiverseWorks proves my point. As you approach the space’s main gallery, you’ll hear strains of bebop saxophone. There’s a point to the exhibition’s jazz soundtrack, just as…
Ride On, Baby
SUN 1/25 Gary Lashinsky has produced countless tours with rockers such as Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. But the stars he’s working with right now spare him the petulant behavior he’s had to deal with in the past. Instead of arguing over contract riders, the 14 white Lipizzaner stallions…
Roll Your Own
There’s a definite technique to rolling the perfect Vietnamese fajita ($10.95 to $12.95) at Mo Mong (1201 Westheimer, 713-524-5664). Each of the six wafer-thin, translucent sheets of gummy rice paper is separated from the others by plastic discs. Carefully remove one of the sheets, placing it on your plate. Then…
Magnums at Opus
Does Houston have room for another upscale nightclub, à la Red Door, Seven Lounge or the Mercury Room? Santosh Varughese, who recently opened Opus, thinks so. Featuring three levels (dance area, bar/lounge and “ultra-exclusive, intimate den”) and located at the former site of the ’40s-era State National Bank, the club…
Eat, Drink, Watch Movie
There are a lot of menu items with corny movie names at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, the multiscreen movie theater in West Oaks Mall where you can eat dinner while you catch a flick. The pepperoni pizza is called a “Porky’s,” and there’s a sundae called “La Dolce Vita.” We’re…
Gut Buster
Ralphie May may weigh 400 pounds, but his act doesn’t rest on fat jokes. “I have to address it when I first get on stage because of what I am,” says May, “but then I move away from it and I never go back.” May may have made an impression…
Songs of Freedom
Fifty musicians, dozens of different instruments from every continent on earth, and three and a half years in the making. Eighty minutes of music, comprising 32 songs with titles like “Supreme Order of the Attention Deficit,” “Deathbed Orgy” and “The Brass Band Liberation Front.” Singing, rapping, chanting and scatting. Rhythms…
Love Bites
Let’s play a word association game. I’ll give you the name of a country, and you give me the image it conjures. Switzerland? Alps. Holland? Legal weed and overall permissiveness. Egypt? Pyramids. And Brazil? Chances are, many of you would say sex. Juju Stulbach, the Rio de Janeiro-bred singer for…