Dish
Victim of Ambition Forced to leave a scuzzy shopping strip earmarked for gentrification, the former Cortes Deli — now called the Cortes Restaurant — has embraced the zeitgeist and done some gentrifying of its own. Its new location at 404 Shepherd boasts a leaded-glass door, a bar, carpets and, of…
Static
Latin twist… At first glance, Calvin Owens and Norma Zenteno might seem an unlikely musical match. But they use their world of differences to distinct advantage on the just-released Es Tu Booty CD, a full-bodied offering of Latinized big-band blues and jazz. Owens, back in town after a 12-year sojourn…
Exceptional Bass
Quick, count the number of bassists you know who have led memorable jazz bands; if you have to use more than one hand to keep track, you’re ahead of the game. By virtue of the role bass plays in jazz, bass players are usually thought of as part of the…
The Return of Superfly
Today’s hard-core rappers are in a difficult position. Many of them achieved success via exciting accounts of drinking, drugging, dealing, whoring and homicide that they defended by claiming the tales were simply reflections of the hard realities in America’s inner cities. But following the murders of Tupac Shakur and the…
Pillow Talk
“Women aren’t the only ones with bosoms, you know.” With that statement, Cornershop’s soft-spoken leader, Tjinder Singh, is attempting to explain the meaning behind the refrain that forms the basis for the addictively catchy chorus of the English band’s latest single, “Brimful of Asha.” On it, Singh — in a…
A Butterfly to Cry For
Puccini’s Madame Butterfly — about a young geisha in Nagasaki, Japan, who loses her honor and ultimately her life over love — premiered in Milan in 1904 and promptly became one of the opera world’s biggest flops. The Milan audience expressed its displeasure by heckling the leading lady and the…
Labor of Love
Texas-tourism flacks like to call Austin the live music capital of the world, but the city’s learn-as-you-gig musical ethos suggests that “live rehearsal capital of the world” might be a better description. Yet on this Friday night, the members of the punk/pop foursome Sixteen Deluxe have assembled at their remote…
Porcelain Pop
In the new Great Expectations, directed by Alfonso Cuaron and scripted by Mitch Glazer, the teeming world of Charles Dickens’s 1861 novel is very loosely updated and transposed to Florida’s Gulf Coast and Manhattan. It wouldn’t be accurate to call this film an adaptation — at its best, it’s more…
On the Nickel
Fifth Ward, first-time director Greg Carter’s film about inhabitants of Houston’s most notorious ghetto, is a charmingly amateurish effort that takes pride in its low-budget bluntness. With its cut-and-paste editing, low-pitched soundtrack, jittery cinematography and actors spouting lines like they’re giving the last performances of their career, Fifth Ward is…
God Help Us
As The Apostle’s title character, E.F. “Sonny” Dewey, writer/director Robert Duvall never stops moving and never speaks in a voice lower than a roar. He runs in place, dances when standing still, hollers even when he whispers; he literally vibrates. Sonny’s a true tent-revival preacher, spitting brimstone threats and heavenly…
The Old Guard
Suited from head to toe in woodlands camouflage, Lynna Kay Shuffield paces back and forth in front of the chalkboard, lecturing on the art of war as taught by Napoleon, Frederick the Great and Sun Tzu. As the first woman, and indeed, one of the few members of the Texas…
Bush’s Big Score
You saw it here first: Governor George W. Bush will run for president in two years, and he’s going to win. Here’s another tip: This month’s purchase of the Texas Rangers by Dallas media mogul Thomas Hicks — a deal in which Bush will make up to $14 million for…
The Insider
Affirmative Transactions Now it can be told: One Houston, the political action committee that funded the defense of the city’s affirmative action policies for last November’s referendum, received gifts from two unlikely and highly questionable sources — the Houston Chronicle and Rebuild Houston, the PAC that promoted the city bond…
Letters
Remembering de Menil I thought Shaila Dewan’s piece on Dominique de Menil was well written and quite moving [Art, “The Last Eccentric,” January 8]. But it made you thirsty for more about this wonderful humanitarian who shared her art, as well as her spirit, with our fair city. Twenty-four years…
Press Picks
thursday january 29 “SCALE: small” The group exhibition focuses on “work that imitates life without getting too realistic about it,” says Sean Rudolph, co-owner of the gallery hosting the show. “[The pieces] have a nice pop art energy … [and suggest] the way size transforms the meaning of an object…
Curries and Quietude
Mention of brasseries always puts me in mind of Paris: Baudelaire reading aloud from Les Fleurs du Mal (“The Devil pulls the strings by which we’re worked”); Proudhon extolling anarchism; Manet defending Dejeuner sur l’Herbe; Sartre pounding the table while making a case for Stalin; Simone de Beauvoir pounding back…
Hot Plate
I eat peach cobbler at the Black-Eyed Pea (2048 West Gray, 523-0200; and other locations) at least once a week, and each time I do, I make the same resolution: Today, I won’t wolf it down; I’ll savor it; I’ll cherish every morsel. Of course, it never happens. When the…