Law Breakers
It’s not often that The Insider is summoned to an informal hearing at the Houston Center food court with a sitting jurist, but County Criminal Court 5 Judge Janice Law is running scared and looking for help anyplace she can find it. There she was with her husband, Fulbright &…
Home of the Squealer
Bet you a beer the biker is going to get the Squealer. The guy with the Fu Manchu mustache and a blue bandanna on his head is sitting at a table near mine at a roadhouse called Tookie’s. He’s wearing a Harley-Davidson sweatshirt with the sleeves torn off to showcase…
He’s Still Our Guy
We have been called to account on our criticism of the Houston Chronicle’s Enron coverage, and we plead guilty. We have questioned some of the work done by Houston’s Leading Information Source, but that was not enough for one reader. He pointed out to us that we had somehow missed…
Stuffit International
It seems that nearly every country has its own version of a savory, stuffed pastry. There are turnovers, empanadas, pasties, piroshkis and calzones, to name just a few. But the Vietnamese, whose cuisine is heavily influenced by the French, have a true stuffed standout. It’s called pâté chaud, or “hot…
Petered Out
Petered Out Laying it on: Thank you for such a well-researched article. What should arrive yesterday, but an annual fund appeal from the MFA [“What’s Wrong with This Picture?” by Jennifer Mathieu, January 17]? I typed my response to Mr. Marzio as follows, the first clause repeated from the fund…
Punk Through the Ages
“Right now, we’re in Minneapolis. It’s cold here!” says Shawn Sides, director of Lipstick Traces, an adaptation of Greil Marcus’s book of the same title. Her Austin-based theater collective, Rude Mechanicals (referred to by devotees as Rude Mechs), is just closing the northern portion of its national tour, an astonishing…
The Idea Man
Ever since Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal as a work of art to the Society of Independents in 1917, people have had a hard time defining the term. The general public seems to equate art with some level of technical proficiency, often dismissing modern works by saying, “I could make…
The Kidz Are All Right
Imagine it: In 2001 Houston boasted three FM stations where one could bounce to Jay-Z, P. Diddy or Ludacris. Stations 97.9 The Box, Hot 97.1 and the upstart (and since reformatted) 100.7 House Party colluded to prove that a triumvirate of urban stations could thrive in Houston, a feat usually…
World Enough and Time
Austin’s the Gloria Record is having a bit of an identity crisis. While the band members’ talents may be fairly obscure and their bankrolls small, their ambition is as huge as their attention to detail is persnickety. “We decided, for whatever reason, that it would be a good idea to…
Unlucky Winners
A recent Sports Illustrated story explored the “cover jinx” legend. According to long-running myth, those who grace that mag’s cover are soon headed for a fall. Senior SI writer Alexander Wolff, evidently a man with plenty of time on his hands, conducted a six-month investigation of SI’s 2,456 covers dating…
Slayer
The good news about Slayer’s current God Hates Us All is that it’s generally been hailed as the band’s best record since whatever anyone’s given favorite might happen to be. The bad news is that, though every facet of the traditional Slayer sound remains, the new CD doesn’t hark back…
Tha Liks
When the L.A.-based rap trio known as Tha Alkaholiks (which has apparently followed Snoop Dogg’s lead and shortened its name in order to save time) dropped X.O. Experience last summer, some music enthusiasts were pissed — not because of the likkered-up lyrical content these boys lacquered over every beat of…
Cross Canadian Ragweed
First off, get this straight: There are no Canadians in this band. Cross Canadian Ragweed is an amalgam of several band members’ names, starting with Texas-born vocalist/ guitarist Cody Canada, drummer Randy Ragsdale and guitarist Grady Cross (bassist Jeremy Plato is the odd man out). The band likes to think…
2 Bitches on Tour
Okay, so it may not be a PC thing to have two DJs, one male and one female, hit the road and call themselves “2 Bitches on Tour.” But hey, there just may be truth in this title. The two spinners in question have been known to get Marge Schott-nasty…
Nicole’s Birthday Bomb
You’ve got to hand it to any romantic comedy that makes The Mexican and the Sweet November remake seem like enduring classics, which appears to be the chief objective of Birthday Girl. This slipshod sophomore effort from Jez Butterworth (Mojo) has been sitting on the shelf since its original release…
Dumped On
Late last year, Pam Bazarsky woke up in a different house with her husband of 37 years.Walter had suffered a major stroke 11 days earlier. The family moved the partially paralyzed 60-year-old man from Methodist Hospital to his daughter’s one-story house. Unlike the couple’s Fountain View town house, it could…
Count Down
There is nothing terribly wrong with Kevin Reynolds’s The Count of Monte Cristo, which the Internet Movie Database lists as the 18th remake of Alexandre Dumas’s tale of innocence betrayed and avenged. It is neither a drag nor a gas; it neither betrays its source material nor adheres too slavishly…
Getting Wasted
The offensive against illegal dumping and pollution has many thrusts, but those involved insist that there is only one goal: to get compliance and cleanups. “Overall, with the staff and resources we have, we are really doing an excellent job of protecting the environment and prosecuting as many violators as…
Those Who Knew Him
Laramie, Wyoming, is set against a big, blue, impossibly beautiful sky. It’s also the place where Mathew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay college student, was tied to a fence post at the edge of a wide lonely prairie, then beaten and left for dead by Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney. This…
Foul Out
Shar-day Campbell was sitting in tenth-grade Spanish when a friend asked her a question. Shar-day answered, and got in trouble for talking during class. As a result, the basketball coach forced the 15-year-old to spend two days after school running laps, climbing stairs and crawling on her hands and knees…
Onegin, Off Again
Those who are drawn to Peter Tchaikovsky’s sentimental ballets are often surprised to learn that the composer also wrote operas. His best known is Eugene Onegin, a work that bears little resemblance to the animated melodrama of his Italian contemporaries. Its story unfolds in a series of lyrical scenes about…