Help Wanted
I know it seems early in the season to be getting into this, but I got caught playing catch-up last time, so we’ll go ahead and start thinking. What we’re thinking about is the Sixth Annual Houston Press Music Awards, which, barring natural disaster, should be happening sometime around the…
Rotation
Ezra Charles and the Works Modern Years Icarus Records In certain circles — including, I’ve got to admit, mine — local showboating pianist and bandleader Ezra Charles is perceived as something of a joke. It’s an attitude arising from Charles’ ever presence on the local scene. Like his female counterpart,…
Good Clean Fun
With all the young blues players spilling out of Austin these days, each one trying just a little too hard to expand the venerable tradition into something modern (i.e., something that won’t sound so out of place on the radio), it does a heart good to hear a young act…
In the Room
Deer Park resident Bob Gallarza may have lived one of the American music industry’s most exotic and long-lived careers, but sitting across a table from him at Butera’s last week, it’s clear that he’s nobody’s idea of a legend. Now nearing 48, he’s something less than trim, and with a…
The Case of the Missing Case
Editor’s Note [January 28, 2015]: Alexander Nizhniy says his country of origin was misidentified in this article and that he was Ukrainian, never Russian. He has since become a U.S. citizen. He also says that most of the people at the party were Ukrainian. _____________________ The Houston Police Department was…
Opening Up
It was a month prior to the November 8 election, and Garnet Coleman was again missing in action. And people were talking. The Houston state representative had abruptly withdrawn as co-chairman of Ann Richards’ campaign in Harris County. One Democratic activist reported having seen an unshaven Coleman months earlier in…
Original Art?
Sherrie Levine, who has an installation currently on display at the Menil, is probably the seminal artist of today’s generation involved with appropriating preexisting images. She has had as much to do with altering and expanding the way we regard contemporary art’s relationship with art history and the marketplace as…
Full Service Filmmaker
Until Austin’s Rick Linklater created Dazed and Confused, and San Antonio’s Robert Rodriguez produced El Mariachi, Houston’s Eagle Pennell was the first director to come to mind when the issue of independent filmmaking in Texas was raised. Pennell, for better or worse, was the poster boy for low-budget Lone Star…
Sounding the Soul
In the middle of the public premiere of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the elderly, decrepit, bitter composer leaves his seat in the audience and wanders on-stage, as if drawn by a supernatural beacon. By this time in life, Beethoven is deaf; to sense his own music even faintly, he…
Dorothy Done Dirty
Director Alan Rudolph no doubt planned for Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle to be a revealing, insightful movie about Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, a celebrated gang of critics and writers who were witty, and decadent, all through the 1920s. The Algonquin wits were famous not because…
The Race Matter
White children can cost almost three times as much to adopt as black children; the fees can be $17,000 for white babies, compared to about $6,000 for black. That cold fact of life, true mostly for babies from private adoption agencies, is often attributed to the basic economic principle of…
The Children’s Crusade
If the Reverend John Bowie should feel at home anywhere, it should be where he is right now: in the pulpit of the True Light Missionary Baptist Church on North Main. This is the church his father built, in the neighborhood in which John Bowie was raised. It was where…
Letters
Holiday Wishes Thank you, Mr. Szatmary, for your insightful comments regarding Houston-area theater this Christmas season [Theater, “Playing the Season,” by Peter Szatmary, December 8]. We at the AD Players were delighted to read your affirmation of our company as a theater with a stated purpose. We consider it our…
Press Picks
thursday january 5 Search & Destroy Theatre LaB’s delicious “Sin Theater” continues with the sin of greed, as in, “The road to greed is filled with possibilities.” Playwright Howard Korder produced this dark comedy at the end of the Reagan-Bush era, and it is clearly an indictment of a style…
Back in the River
One of the more pleasant rewards of obsessive restaurant-going is to return to an old friend that you’ve forsworn for one reason or another, only to find it back on track. I had drifted away from the River Cafe in recent years, disappointed by a series of bland fish specials…
Mexican Workout
It was months before I went inside Don Tako, and it was time wasted. I had sped by on the Gulf Freeway shooting dubious glances at the new arrival occupying the space once held by my erstwhile gym, but didn’t its bright sign and too-cute name smack of plastic? And…