Watching the Detectives
“Yeah, they’re a pretty cool band! There’s this guy down front who breathes fire.” That succinct review, delivered by a wowed patron into his cell phone as he left the Continental Club, is right on the mark. The ten-piece collective known as Clouseaux is one of the most vibrant new…
Number One with a Bullet
Late last year, Interscope Records at long last released Nirvana, a 14-song best-of that features not only tracks from Bleach, Nevermind, In Utero and Unplugged, but the long-lost “You Know You’re Right.” The song, recorded almost a decade ago by Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl, had been tied…
He Ain’t Ever Coming Back
Like fellow punk forebears the Ramones last year, the Clash, which dissolved amid drug abuse and splintering musical agendas in the mid-1980s, found itself among the list of 2003 inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. As part of the March induction, Joe Strummer, his long-estranged songwriter partner…
Sidecar Sideshow
“We can’t forget why we’re here today,” said the lead singer of Katy emocore band Soul Harbour from the stage at the Sidecar Pub. “It’s about protesting the Houston Press, and how they don’t cover the scene. I know I don’t have $10,000 to send the music editor for a…
Double Your Pleasure
By the time I was stumbling around the kitchen looking for a corkscrew to open the bottle of Francis Coppola wine I swiped off the massive table o’ alcohol on the covered patio, the New Year’s Eve party at Sam and George Cole’s house was already another one for the…
The Odd Couple
Houston police responded on a late April evening to a 911 call from a town-house complex just off Chimney Rock in southwest Houston. A woman had reported that the guy she lived with had threatened to kill her if she didn’t hand over her gun and car keys. Officers edged…
Grady Gaines and the Texas Upsetters / Calvin Owens
Houston’s reigning blues horn kings couldn’t have more different approaches to music. Sax man Gaines — perhaps because of the years he’s spent playing requests at Etta’s, Sierra Grill and innumerable weddings — is something of a musical chameleon, and Jump Start is as stylistically varied as one of his…
A Guarded Past
Embittered convicts sometimes remark in derision to their prison overseers, “If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have a job.” And so it is with the new Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville. Former Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) employees are responsible for the museum’s existence, and constitute most of…
Ground Zero Hour
Spike Lee’s adaptation of David Benioff’s 2001 novel The 25th Hour hews closely to the original tale, which the author has adapted in screenplay form. Montgomery Brogan, a working-class white boy who dreamed of being a New York City firefighter till he fell into the soft pile of easy money…
Back in the Saddle
Barely two months after he abruptly resigned as Mayor Lee Brown’s chief of staff, former city parks director Oliver B. Spellman has returned to the public arena with a new job in local government. Spellman is one of three top lieutenants hired by incoming Harris County Precinct 2 Commissioner Sylvia…
Honeymoon? Sweet!
According to various unreliable sources on the Internet, Just Married co-stars Ashton Kutcher (forever to be known as the star of Dude, Where’s My Car?) and Brittany Murphy (who wears way too much scary makeup even when she isn’t playing mental patients who’ll never tell) are now actually planning to…
Man of the Year
The Houston Chronicle took time out from its busy holiday schedule to thank its readers for making Houston “the vibrant city that it is.” In a full-page ad on New Year’s Day, the Chron told Houstonians, “It’s you who make it easy for us to come to work each day.”…
Straining Day
Written and directed by. With..
Seventh-Inning Stretch
Well, it’s January 2003 and a decision about the playground at T.H. Rogers education center seems far away. Houston school trustees adroitly skippity-hopped their way out of this minefield and handed the mess off to Superintendent Kaye Stripling. They’re out of it. No micromanaging for them. At least officially. On…
Adapt This
Adaptation is the most overrated movie of the year (of all time?) by people who should know better. Either film critics have been suckered in by its gimmick (Being John Malkovich screenwriter Charlie Kaufman can’t adapt a book for the big screen and winds up writing himself into his screenplay,…
On the Outs with Indigos
On the Outs with Indigos Insights only: Pardon me for sounding skeptical, but haven’t we all seen and/or heard about people like this before [“Alien-ated Youth,” by Dylan Otto Krider, December 19]? Extremely gifted and talented children who are left unchallenged by their classes and often cause behavior problems are…
Vanity Fare
As far as he can remember, he always wanted to be an actor. To him, being an actor was better than being president of the United States. Even before he first wandered into the high school auditorium for an after-school audition, he wanted to be one of them. It was…
Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee?
Imagine conducting a classic symphony while the composer himself looks on. That’s exactly the pressure directors Gregory Boyd and Pam McKinnon will face when Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? open at the Alley Theatre this month. Both works were written by Houston playwright…
The Power of Three
Not since the final Hair Ball, its defunct fund-raiser, has Lawndale Art Center been responsible for such wonderful weirdness as is currently on display in its galleries. The three exhibits — two by established Texas artists, the third by a local group of up-and-comers — are distinctly different, but they…
Snapping Rappers
Photographer Ricky Powell could have ended up a substitute teacher with an interesting hobby. But besides having talent, the New York native had a little luck. In the mid-’80s, Powell got to know Adam Horowitz, a.k.a. Beastie Boy Ad Rock. Powell photographed the Beasties and soon became part of their…
Kathleen Gilje
Texas Gallery is showing works by Rembrandt, Mantegna, Rubens and Holbein — sort of. Kathleen Gilje paints dead-on Old Master facsimiles, but with subversive twists. Her incredible technical facility was honed through her years of work as a conservator. Her alterations are seamlessly integrated into the utterly convincing paintings. Rubens’s…
John Wesley Austin
Judging by the success of Will Rogers, Jeff Foxworthy and Rodney Carrington, comedy has always had room for funny men with a little red around the neck. Cowboy comedian John Wesley Austin spins his yarn with 100 percent natural fibers — that is, the stuff of real life. Austin tells…
Lang Lang
Young Chinese pianist Lang Lang first made a name for himself when he substituted for an indisposed Andre Watts at the 1999 Ravinia Festival’s “Gala of the Century.” Since then, he’s played sold-out performances around the world, including recitals with Christoph Eschenbach and a critically acclaimed debut at Carnegie Hall…
Bill Minutaglio
In the spring of 1947, the entire country was focused on Houston’s neighbor Texas City, the petrochemical boomtown where two oceangoing freight ships carrying more than 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate exploded. Theories about the cause of the accident, which killed almost 700 people and injured 5,000 more, ranged from…
Hangover W(h)ine
“No liquor, no limes,” said the bartender at the downtown wine bar La Carafe (813 Congress, 713-229-9399). The joint has always been one of my favorites, but what’s a poor cocktail columnist supposed to do here? I settled for a weird variation of wine spritzer that combined South African Semillon…
New Digs, Old Tricks
In 1924, the year the Sam Houston Hotel first opened, Damon Runyon was America’s best-read journalist. With an incredible eye for detail, Runyon depicted boxers, gamblers and criminals in a lurid, slangy prose style that caught the spirit of the times. He described housewife/ murderer Ruth Snyder, for instance, as…
The Mark of Excellence
Just when you thought you had experienced all possible dessert epiphanies, the raspberry shortbread tart ($6.95) rolls along at Mark’s American Cuisine (1658 Westheimer, 713-523-3800). The house-made individual pastry shell is thick and moist with butter, and flaky beyond belief. It’s filled to the brim with warm-baked raspberries, which bubble…