Patricia Vonne
Plenty of singers from the South have made the trek to New York looking for a fresh start or, at best, a chance to be the next big thing. Now it’s Patricia Vonne Rodriguez’s turn. Born in San Antonio of Tex-Mex and Spanish stock, some hefty artistic genes — her…
The Bradford Game
If Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal has a guardian angel, its earthly incarnation last week went by the name of state District Judge Brian Rains. Before the jurist mercifully pulled the plug on the trial of Houston Police Chief Clarence O. Bradford for aggravated perjury, the proceeding had produced…
Double Standards?
Double Standards? Watch out for the kids: As much as I try, I can’t see any difference in what you wrote about here [“The Odd Couple,” by Tim Fleck, January 9] and the child molestation reportedly taking place in some religions. People in authority who molest children are criminals. It…
Spiraling, with Ice-9 and James Catholic
Once known as You Were Spiraling, this Jersey quartet is driven by keyboard whiz Tom Brislin. Other feathers in Brislin’s cap include touring with Yes and Meat Loaf’s band on VH1’s Storytellers jaunt. Luckily, Spiraling is not as bombastic as either of those two quasi-operatic guilty pleasures. While the band’s…
Tradition!
January has brought some cold weather to Houston, but the ever thoughtful Houston Chronicle has seen fit to warm our hearts with a special treat. Usually we have to wait for January (or thereabouts) of even-numbered years to reread the Chron’s classic op-ed column about how the paper’s editorial outlook…
Take Your Grant And…
What’s wrong with donning a long white phallus and parading through the streets of Harlem? Don’t ask artist William Pope.L; ask the National Endowment for the Arts. Pope.L had been planning to fund the aptly titled Member with a grant from the NEA — that is, until he mentioned his…
Missy Elliott
These days everybody’s praising Missy Elliott’s “Work It” as one of the best pop songs of the moment. They’re right, but they’re also missing the larger point: As always with La Elliott, “Work It” works even better within the context of its album. Elliott is one of the few pop…
The Orange Show
Moeller’s Bakery (4201 Bellaire Boulevard, 713-667-0983) has been turning orange rolls ever since the family business opened its doors in 1930. The rolls, sold by the dozen ($5.90), may be simple little things, but they pack a powerful taste punch, thanks to the orange zest and orange pieces inside each…
Pinup Guy
Jermaine Rogers had no formal art training, but in 1995 the Houston poster artist made the bold move of quitting a menial day job to hawk his bills around town, mostly for shows at Numbers. Work was so hard to come by that he had to sell the originals of…
Billy Ray Reynolds
Well, at least no one could accuse Billy Ray Reynolds of politicking for a solo career. After decades as an itinerant songwriter (Johnny Cash, Tanya Tucker, John Conlee), a bit-part actor and, most famously, a guitar player and backup singer for Waylon Jennings, the 59-year-old is finally making his proper…
Daydream Believer
My friend was vacationing in Mexico, and I imagined him passing the hot, sultry days sitting on a barstool submerged in some fancy hotel pool and drinking cheap, no-name tequila. As I grabbed the martini-handled door to the Davenport (2115 Richmond, 713-520-1140), I thought, well, it’s not Acapulco, but it’s…
Judy Blunt
Judy Blunt’s Breaking Clean started out as an essay for a literature course at the University of Montana. Her classmates and professor found the work’s few pages deeply moving. “For the first time,” the author has said, “I felt the power of the written word from the other side, from…
Twisted Logic
Director Roger Donaldson was part of a wave of Australian talent who went Hollywood in the ’80s, but he hasn’t fared as well here as colleagues like Peter Weir, Phillip Noyce and George Miller. His biggest hit was probably Cocktail and his best American film was either Species or No…
The Ying Quartet
The four siblings of the Ying family know what to do with sibling rivalry: turn it into beautiful music. In 1992, they formed the Ying Quartet in the unlikely town of Jessup, Iowa, where they became the first recipients of a National Endowment for the Arts grant to support chamber…
Blowin’ Smoke
First off, make no mistake: Biker Boyz is not, and has no intentions of being, The Fast and the Furious on two wheels, which will be considered a serious shame by the 12- to 12-year-old demographic who were hoping to chug a little more Diesel fuel till the official sequel’s…
GET and Pre-Existing Conditions
Performer-director John Malpede knows something about the psychology of greed and the lives of its victims. He’s the artistic director of LAPD (Los Angeles Poverty Department), a theater group founded and operated by homeless individuals on L.A.’s skid row. He laid the groundwork for his group while working as a…
Dead Again
Let’s start with two raves and a beef. Final Destination 2 is a tight, rockin’ popcorn flick packed with nasty kicks. It’s also a rare beast, a second horror-franchise installment that matches and in some ways supersedes the original (unlike such sputterings as Jaws 2, A Nightmare on Elm Street…
Taiwan’s Tapioca Attack
The young Asian woman behind the counter at Lollicup whips up my jasmine tea and my date’s mango slushy at blinding speed. “Tapioca?” she offers. “Of course,” I reply. After adding a couple of spoonfuls of the dark, pea-sized balls to our drinks, she runs the plastic cups through a…
A Woolf in Goat‘s Clothing
When Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was first produced in the early ’60s, critic Robert Coleman declared it “a sick play for sick people.” Prudish as he might sound, Coleman was dead on. Martha and George, the middle-aged vipers at the center of Albee’s tour de force, are…
Unloco en la Cabeza
Joey Duenas dreams big — perhaps a bit too big. The vocalist for Austin hard rock band Unloco had hoped the band’s 2001 full-length Maverick Records debut, Healing, would be a smash out of the gate, catapulting them to the upper (or at least upper-middle) ranks of success. After its…
The Art of War
If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out” — law number 196 from the Code of Hammurabi. Some 3,700 years ago in what is now Iraq, King Hammurabi established the first comprehensive law code and engraved it in cuneiform — the world’s…
New Bands from Old
The supergroup is one of rock and roll’s best innovations. Taking established talent and combining it with another acknowledged talent is a no-brainer. It should be money in the bank, the kind of sure thing that keeps careers rolling and transforms the sycophantic blurbs of press kits from puff pieces…
Yigal Ozeri
Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper has disappeared, according to artist Yigal Ozeri. Most of us know the Last Supper through its muting veil of time and mold. But recent restorations have stripped the painting of its patina of age — along with quite a bit of da Vinci’s original pigment…
Phantom of the Opry
If you have more than a passing fancy for college football, it’s likely you are all too familiar with that wretched two-year-old Garth Brooks Dr Pepper commercial. It’s not the one where the “retired” Garth sweetly serenades his daughters to sleep to Nickel Creek’s backing; it’s the one where His…
Your New Friends?
Last October, Sue Vertue found herself in a Los Angeles soundstage watching the filming of a pilot for a would-be NBC sitcom. The storyline of this particular episode dealt, more or less, with the horrific (and, of course, capital-H hilarious!) fallout that comes when a man’s girlfriend finds his porn…
Achtung! Stuka!
Over the years, Tim Murrah has given plenty of people plenty of reasons to hate his guts. As manager and occasional DJ of the downtown basement club Metropol (now Underground Lounge, 804 Fannin), Murrah ruled his nocturnal underworld with an iron fist and utter disregard for pretense and bullshit. He…
Peace Signs
The handful of freezing demonstrators trudges through the streets of Washington, D.C., their unit leader bellowing through a bullhorn. Waving signs bearing the distinctive Lone Star silhouette, the five show no sign of giving up their mission. Hours earlier, this group was 42 strong, comprising fresh Houston recruits in the…
Papa Roach
Talk about trying to leave the past behind. For his band’s recent album Lovehatetragedy, Papa Roach’s vocalist, until recently known as Coby Dick, reverted to the name Jacoby Shaddix. In addition to sounding cooler than his stage name, that just happens to be what’s on his birth certificate. Ditching the…
Coming Down
At six o’clock on a clear Saturday morning, Mike Grant went to NASA’s Johnson Space Center to join Mission Control in the final welcome back for the returning space shuttle Columbia. The 19-year-old aeronautical engineering major at Purdue University — he was quick to point out it is Neil Armstrong’s…
Jorma Kaukonen and Blue Country
Conventional American pop music history has it that the tunes of rural Southern blacks and whites never converged until Elvis came along. Actually, it had been going on for decades — Elvis was just one of the first and prettiest people to do it on TV. Bob Wills had Elvis…
Last Rites
At first the debris field was exciting. Normal people don’t have precedent for dealing with spaceships exploding over their heads. Driving southeast from Dallas down U.S. Highway 175 a few hours after the crash, you could see it in people’s eyes — the alert, panoramic gaze of shock and anticipation…
Lucy Kaplansky
To begin with a small caveat: The next time any contemporary folkie writes a song about how you fell asleep in the passenger seat on our all-night drive across the desert and I looked at you in the dashboard light and felt us growing further apart, I swear to God…
Sounds of Silence
As the daughter of an actor, Malisa Janes tells of a nearly lifelong love of the theater. She says she moved from Illinois to Houston eight years ago because of the Bayou City’s impressive array of theatrical productions and performance halls. So when the $92 million Hobby Center for the…
The Lyricist Lounge Tour
Those who wrote off Das EFX at the end of the ’90s had better prepare to eat crow: Krazy Drazyz and Skoob (that’s “books” backward) got stuck with a lot of labels during the past decade, but “quitters” wasn’t one of them. Now the two-man crew is once again in…
George W. Bush: Fightin’ Man!
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